How to Start a Business

Graduate from high school with decent grades, a better-than-decent SAT score, and a bunch of extracurriculars to pad your college applications. Speak at graduation and walk off the stage convinced you’ve figured out how the world works.

Get accepted into a giant state university. Sign up for 8 a.m. classes you’ll never have the discipline to attend. Experience shock that professors don’t care about you or your excuses. Change your major so many times you lose track. Squander much of your 4.5 years drinking and playing video games. Squeak by with a 2.9 GPA. Walk out of graduation convinced you have no idea how the world works.

Talk your way into a job as a newspaper reporter even though you didn’t get into the journalism program at that giant state school. Work six days a week for $19,000 a year until you burn out 18 months later.

Take a gap year to live with a friend in a cool city. Wait tables. Substitute teach. Get back into drinking and video games. Rack up enough credit card debt that you have no choice but to finally get a “real job”.

Take the first “real job” offered to you and move out west. Get to truly know yourself for the first time at age 24 by moving somewhere you don’t know a soul. Learn what meetings and dress pants are. Work remotely, long before it’s cool. Foolishly accept a $5k raise to move back home and get stuck in a cubicle.

Spend seven years in the corporate world. Chase empty titles and 3% raises. Realize you kind of enjoy the thrill of this game, even though you know it’s silly. Eventually get tired of it, but remain too scared to quit. Endure a recession. Learn that investments don’t always go up. Watch your employer go bankrupt. (Get them to pay for your master’s degree before they go under.)

Convince your entrepreneurial college roommate to let you join his new company as employee number 3. Pour your heart and soul into someone else’s business for 7 years and learn more than any degree program could ever teach you. Realize at age 30 that there is such a thing as meaningful work.

Make a jump to tech and join a well-known company you’ve always admired. Love most of it (especially the coffee/snacks), but find it slightly boring and way too comfortable.

Start a Medium blog. Make $58. Spend a week wondering if you could be a paid writer. Start a newsletter. Offer career coaching. Make a little money on the side and start to get some bigger ideas.

Jump to another tech company the same month a pandemic hits. Hang on for a few months then get laid off. Panic. Email everyone you know asking if they need consulting work. Immediately get hired back as a contractor by the company that laid you off. Buy some Bitcoin and Gamestop stock because YOLO.

Register an LLC and buy a domain name. Get one client. Then another. Then another. Take home more money in a month than ever before. Have a panic attack trying to do it all solo.

Pivot. Then pivot again. Get a business partner and say you’re going all in. When revenue plateaus, take a full-time job to pay the bills. When revenue steadies, quit the job. When it stalls again, pick up a part-time gig. Keep it for six months, until things finally feel stable. For real this time. Probably.

Look up a year later, incredibly proud of the business you’ve built.

Remain unsure how the world works. Be okay with it.