Ugh! FB finally completely got rid of its Notes section, which used to be the blog section. So basically all my old stuff is gone. So I had to revert this post to this super old wordpress site. Eh, maybe this will motivate me to migrate all of them to one spot. Pfft! Bahahaha!! sure… Anyway, back to my original stream of consciousness post…

I was having a quick text conversation with someone today which reminded me of the company I used to work for a long time ago. This is back when I worked in the Event Production industry. I looked up the old company which had merged with another company and pretty much almost all the remnants of the old company had been washed away to the new company. These things happen but it was like a part of me and a part of my past was washed away with it.

With that, however, it did remind me of something very significant in my life.

In 2009, we were in the heart of the “Great Recession” from the housing bubble burst. The event production industry tends to be the first to take the hit and usually the last to recover from it. We had just seemed to be returning to our old fast pace of work prior to the recession from the last economic downturn from the events of September 11th. There futile attempts to thwart the downturn but it was to no avail.

Subsequently the company I worked for had to lay people off. This happens. I had survived the layoffs from the previous downturn and also was given assurance that they were going to attempt to “ride the storm out”. But on September 9th of 2009, in the afternoon I was called down to the main office to be notified that I was going to be laid off. The reason given to me at the time is that I was one that would be more capable of dealing with it versus my co-workers. By the way, my direct boss was not informed of this and lost his shit when he saw me come upstairs with box in hand packing up my desk. He was, and is a good dude.

Now the reason I point out the date this happened was something I even noticed myself on that day. It was 999 day. It was like right before the mileage counter on your car turned over and it was like starting from 000. I took this as a sign. Of course you are always looking for signs and reasons when your life fall apart. (Nobody ever looks for these things when life is going well. Food for thought)

It is also interesting to note, that due to me wanting to cut my personal operational costs, I had previously moved out of my apartment and moved in with a friend to save money on rent just over a month prior. Quite fortuitous there

I was also dating a person that realistically I shouldn’t have. They were a good person but they were younger than me and at the time we had different goals. Even though we seem to tell each other that we had the same goals.

Also a key element here was that I was in the hole a bit in the whole check cashing scam. This, of all the dumb things I have done in my life (and there are many) is absolutely the dumbest thing I ever got wrapped up in.

There was absolutely no way I would predict how life was going to solve all of these things. Particularly with the bombshell of being laid off now in the mix.

So the next morning, instead of sitting around and feeling sorry for myself, I got up early and got super active. I signed up for college, I went through the process of getting on unemployment, started looking for a new job (any job) and started my own business. I cashed out the little bit of 401k that I had to pay off anything that I owed so I won’t have to deal with that at the same time as dealing with being unemployed (Problem 1 solved, the check cashing debacle). Plus, this surprisingly set myself up to survive what was going to be a long unemployment period. I was going to do anything to survive, because that is what I was taught to do. As they say, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. I was doing all the things with the understanding that most of them would fail. But one of them had a likelihood of working out.

But here’s where we get the point of this whole story. At the time, I was working only with the information I had available to me. Retrospectively, I could have done things differently and that would have made more sense. Specifically, I started a business that had to do with the the Event Production industry that I was already laid off from. Why? That was kind of doomed to fail from the start. Also add the fact that I absolutely hate doing sales. And when you run your own business, it’s 99 percent sales and 1 percent doing the thing that you actually enjoy doing that was the reason you started the business in the first place. And honestly I wasn’t a big fan of that kind of work. It was a lot of work. I just didn’t realize it at the time.

The second blunder at the time was going back to school. The going back to school was a good thing, the blunder was that I was going back to school for a degree in business management. Which seemed like a smart idea at the time, but realistically I probably should have chosen one of the other THREE DEGREE PROGRAMS I STARTED and didn’t finish. Or, a degree program I already had certification in from the Navy? :facepalm:

The third blunder was looking for a job. Looking for a job was a great idea, looking for just any job was horrible. I would apply at places and literally got people saying to me “we can’t hire you because you are over qualified”, and that not making any sense at the time. It makes sense now. But at the time it was like “I just want to work man!!”. Whereas they were like “I want to hire a person that is going to work this job for more than 6 months to a year and not quit on me as soon as something better comes along”. And in the current recession, there were a bunch of people that fit that description more than me.

The hardest thing to do is to look at things pragmatically when you are depressed, desperate and looking at things the wrong way. Not necessarily wrong, but maybe “wrong adjacent”. The thing that sucks is that everyone around you pretty much sees things the same way too. Why? Because part of the reason that people are your friends is that they are like minded people. Plus they also want to be supportive. Nobody really had a better idea because they all thought I was doing the right thing and I was really going at it better than others.

But after 3 months, nothing was happening. I was living in a country music song. I was out of work, girlfriend left me (problem #2 solved?), I living on the kindness of strangers and doing the shell game with cash to get by. I was using student loan money on top of unemployment to pay rent and live off of. (problem 3 kind of solved but creating a new problem?) Literally had moments where I had to borrow cash from a friend to buy a bagel and coffee. I was pretty low.

But thankfully a bunch of my friends were like, “hey! Learn how to use Linux and come work at this company”. I went all in. Still nothing.

Wait…

“But didn’t you used to work there?”

Yes! Interestingly I only got the job there because of a Michigan Works Program that from what I understand paid a portion of my wages to the company or reimbursed the company if I didn’t work out. I had to take an aptitude test by Michigan Works to be recommended by them to that job. That’s with already having a few friends that already worked there and one of them was the CTO!

Ultimately I did start working there. I did spend the next 5 years burying myself in technology. Working 8 hours, going home and self learning for 8 hours. If I wasn’t working or sleeping, I was learning. I would take time off to hang out with my friends and family so I didn’t burned out. But I completely immersed myself in it.

Obviously luck and hard work paid off.

The takeaways from all this was this…

The future is unwritten. And that in and of itself is what breeds hope. You can’t see the way out of a hole because if you could, you wouldn’t be in the hole in the first place. But you have to believe that you can figure it out eventually. There is no sense in sitting in the hole and bitching about it till you starve to death and die.

If you are going to go down, go down fighting. Have hope. As shitty as things got, I still had hope. I was still trying. Honestly the effort started to trail off after 3 months. The last 6 months till I started working again were kind of horrible. But I was still trying, still fighting.

As in golf, don’t force a bad lie (not in like telling a lie, but in a lie angle). In golf, if you have a bad lie, you have to make a choice. You can either try to push through to the hole and just keep making things worse. You can take a short shot back to get yourself in better position, or you can “take a drop” and drop the ball back in the fairway and take a 2 stroke penalty. You can’t do them all. There is no right answer and all of them have the potential to suck. Here’s the best part, the choice really doesn’t matter. The end goal is putting the ball in a hole. There really isn’t any reason to go with reckless abandon and will to get a desired result. It’s very likely not going to happen and that going actually be better anyway. Once that hole is done, you have the next hole to work with. By the end of the game, really you end up with a really interesting story about this series of good or bad decisions you made. But you will finish regardless. Is this really worth being militant and imposing your will and having a shit fit because things didn’t go your way? Nope. Just relax. Don’t force the situation. Just make the best judgement call you can with what you have and figure out the next step after that.

That also leads into the statement that I say a lot. Don’t try to figure out the whole thing from the start. Holy shit on a shingle do we all do that way too much. I was probably the worst at this. I couldn’t just make a decision about the current moment. I had to figure out every little option and variable beforehand. I would get super frustrated that things won’t go my way and be constantly re-thinking and re-adjusting. It was a good friend and mentor that said to me once “you think to damn much”. He was right. Solve the problem at hand and move onto the next. Also, don’t solve the “potential” problem that may or may not happen. If it does, figure it out then. Otherwise, save the brain power for more fun and interesting things.

What did I learn from all this. I can’t predict the future. I can’t honestly know what is the best way to go for myself let alone others. What I can say is this:
– We never know where we are going to end up and that’s ok. But not doing anything doesn’t go anywhere.
– Sitting around bitching about it doesn’t go anywhere.
– Be up for trying and failing, A LOT! It’s realistically how we learn.
– But learn from you mistakes. Doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results has been referred to as the definition of insanity.
At the very least it will drive you insane.

I don’t have all the answers. Anyone who does is trying to sell you something.

Don’t be afraid to fail. Worst case, I have a coffee and bagel I owe you…

Peace and Balance