Ready, Fire, Aim!

We missed our target, but we achieved our goal!

Someone once said, “If you give yourself 30 days to clean your house, it will take you 30 days. If you only have three hours to clean it, you’ll find a way to get it done in 3 hours.” I don’t know why, but that’s been stuck in my head for a long time lately.

I use pronouns like “we”, “us”, “our”, etc throughout the content items on this page. However, in reality, it’s only really me (and my kids occasionally putting stickers on tins if the candy bribe is large enough). “We”, “us” and “our” does sound better though, more established. Someday, that’s the end goal.

A few years ago I had an idea to start a small woodworking business out of my garage and basement. It was the combination of a hobby I got a sense of accomplishment from by creating something with my own hands, some foolish thinking that I could make something cheaper than it would be to buy it, and a bit of an ego that if “that guy” can do it, I certainly could too!

Needless to day, it never came to fruition and was shelved, carelessly left to collect both figurative and literal dust as life had other things for me to deal with. It was never completely forgotten though: this idea of a hobby-turned-business, accountability for my own goals and direction to take it, festered like a splinter in the side of your finger you couldn’t quite entirely pull out with your teeth and only buried itself deeper each time you tried to dig it out (probably should buy a pair of good tweezers to celebrate my first sale).

A few weeks ago (actually October 10th - I had to look to get the reference below right), I got an email from my kids’ school. Actually, every week I get an email from my kids’ school. But, it’s not what you think, my kids are good kids. The email is a weekly school newsletter that the principle and entire teaching body of the school send out. However, what particularly caught my eye in this one email, was a bold bullet “VENDORS NEEDED!!!!”, advertising the First Ever Virtual CLES Winter Bazaar fundraising event.

I think before I got to the bathroom at work (don’t roll your eyes at me, we all know everyone goes into the work bathroom to non-work related things) I was already responding to the newsletter and figuratively digging through the cobwebbed corners of my brain for all of my old business ideas. I was close to starting things before; I had the name, incorporation and was registered with the state. It had been so long though, that it fell out of good standing and I didn’t know how long it would take to rectify that.

Long story short, and I’ve been up late enough these last two weeks, to tie this back into the “clean your house in three hours” quote from above, had I not responded to that email about the Bazaar, it would probably be ten times as long before I accomplished as much I have in the last four weeks.

And so, here I am, now with a legit business and a loose idea of the direction I want to take things. Only time will tell if the tweezers I need are the ones to pull the splinter from my hands as I keep working, or the figurative ones to pull the crazy idea out of my head and go back to focusing on work things at work in the work bathroom.