It’s almost my 45th birthday.
The sobering fact is that my life is already half done. I’m not being morbid — I’m just doing math. Let’s face it. When I ask my insurance agent life insurance questions, he tells me that his actuarial table says that I will live until I am 87. This takes into account that I am not a smoker, that my grandfather had pancreatic cancer, and that I have already lived to the ripe old age of 45 (which, statistically puts me in the group of people that will not die before the age of 45, obviously).
So since my life is almost half done, I figure I should spend as much of it as possible doing stuff that I love. This morning, I stopped to meet with one of my old mentors and his wife. Actually, she is a mentor to me now too. They are 5 or 10 years older than me (more or less — she actually looks younger than me), but much, much wiser. I love them dearly. I stopped in to the bagel shop (they go there for coffee every morning) to talk to them about my day job. I got there early and had a cuppa joe and (you guessed it) a bagel.
It was quiet, and I was alone with my thoughts about how great my family is and how much I appreciate all the great stuff in my life. Sappy but true. I was just hanging out thinking deep thoughts. Since it was 6AM, I didn’t even worry about being late for my day job. It was my time, and I was spending it self-medicating with a warm caffeinated beverage.
The whole experience made me think how nice it would be to be a bagel shop blogger. Seriously.
So, I snapped a picture of the counter (every blog post needs a graphic), uploaded it to WordPress and started writing.
Years ago, when my oldest kids were in elementary school, I used to drop them off and grab a coffee at Starbucks on my way back to my day job. By 8AM I was usually busy working on my phone standing in line waiting on my Triple Grande Mocha as the emails piled in and I felt guilty about not being early to work. That Starbucks was in a nice part of town where lots of really rich people live. Now in Dallas, Texas when you say “rich people” we are talking about real money. Guys in khaki shorts and button down collar shirts wearing loafers from Neiman Marcus with no socks. In many cases the loafers cost more than my laptop.
I used to wonder — what do those guys do for a living? They were sitting around in their fancy casual clothes chatting about the weather with their other rich friends while I was late for work. How cool would it be to have that sort of freedom and independence?
I wonder how many of them where bagel shop bloggers taking a coffee break?
It’s a serious question. Internet business models are one of the few ways that you can make money that you can scale mostly independent of hours and employees. Consulting is awesome, but eventually you run out of hours in a day. My day job is awesome, but there are real limits to how much money I can make there. I can open a donut shop, but to make real money, I’ll need 10 donut shops, employees and a bunch of capital.
Not so for internet business. Not to say that internet business is easy money. But the potential to scale it is essentially limitless. Constraints are generally not geographic. Most internet businesses are automation friendly. Internet business can be scaled. And that’s what makes it awesome.
Just something to think about.
