First Causes

Wednesday, August 16, 2006 at 01:21am by Evan Prieskop in Start-Ups

There are types, shades is you will, of knowledge. There are facts and theories, rumors and rationales, but the most elusive—the subtlest and rarest shade of knowledge—is wisdom. I am a bit young yet to lay claim to vast stores of this valuable resource, but I have watched the rise and fall of more than a few start-ups. Thus I reserve Wednesdays’ essays for wisdom and weirdness, for the ephemera of enterprise, entrepreneurs, and existentialism.

I was twenty-two years old. After five quarters of college I had dropped out. I dropped out not because my grades were poor (they were excellent), not because my job was great (it was boring), and certainly not because I did not like college (it was absolutely the happiest year and a half of my life).

I quit because I was out of money.

I grew up in the middle class, a member of what my mother called the shabby-genteel. I was a bright kid, “promising” muttered my mentors and educators encouragingly, and I wanted to get a degree. I grew up on stories about the teenagers of my parent’s generation working their way through college on minimum wage jobs, so the fact that my single mom could not put enough money away for me to go to college did not worry me too much.

As it worked out, by the time I got to college I was far better off than most. Having skipped the table-waiting career stage, I got a few fast promotions at a small customer service company, and I was running my own (tiny) department for 34k a year. I was working full-time at a good wage, yet still I was drowning. This was in California, so half my paycheck was sinking into rent for a mangy rented room. Add to that car payments, gas, and insurance. (Cars are not optional in California; I had a 75-mile triangular commute.) Then pile on quarterly tuition and books…34k disappears pretty fast. Somewhere in the past fifty years the actual costs of going to college while living on your own and working full-time got way out of hand.

A few months after I quit college, frustrated and hurt by the necessity to do so and desperately scrabbling for a way to get back to ol’ academe, the opportunity to start my own business presented itself. I was terrified. The sheer presumption of a pair of twenty-two year olds going out on their own in the old man’s game of small business retail staggered me. Yet, I took the leap and invested months of effort, every penny I had, and my whole financial future in this gamble.

The reason was simple: I wanted to get back to college. My thinking was thus: I invest a few years into starting the business—helping to get established, stabilized, and growing. Then I can turn operational control over to my partner (the business was her dream and she would run it forever given a choice), and I end up with a residual income. Residual income = college.

It was that thought I returned to every time I felt short of breath during the hardscrabble months leading up to opening our doors. It was that thought that I used to beat down the crawling sensation that I had no idea what I was doing. It was that thought that made the sixteen-hour days seem manageable.

Step back from time to time remember your own rationale. Your First Cause is more than the reason you started your own business. It is an invaluable source of courage, strength, endurance, and refreshment.

One Comment

Leave a Comment