Start Your Own Business

Ten years ago I started my own business. At that time I felt this was the best decision ever in my entire life. Ten years after I still feel the same with all my heart.

Having your own business is one of the most challenging situations in which you can put yourself. And I’m not talking only about the financial part of a business. Most of the crash-courses on how to start your own business have a strong focus on the profit and financial facts. They are all selling you methods to reach profit quickly. And, to some extent, those are good and proven methods, but they have nothing to do with the pre-conscious choice of having a business. Those profit making courses are assuming you already took the decision.

In fact, having a business is not at all about profit. If you are serious about it, and if it proves to be a good and mature choice, you will have to face the profit challenges sooner or later. It’s in a business nature to have profit in order to survive. But making profit the most important part in having a business is just wrong. It’s something that you deal with months or years after you started your business for real.

The choice of starting your own business is more like an adventure than a spreadsheet. It’s more about risk taking than financial security. It’s more about personal development and growth than bank statements and material wealth.

In today’s post I’ll share some thoughts about how I decided to start my own business, and how this decision still benefit me after ten years.

The Drive

I was 29 year old when I started my own business. Until that age I was mostly dragging around, living by talking out loud (really, I was working as an anchor man on FM radios, I have a pretty radiophonic voice) and never making plans for tomorrow. For several years in a row I was mostly drinking my evenings out with the same people, borrowing their misery and trying to find reasons to wake up the next day.

But around that age something started to change in me. Never knew how to define that. It was a drive for deep, fundamental and meaningful change. And that desire for change was spreading over all areas of my life: personal, as well as professional. To make a long story short, it was a mix of bad personal choices and amazingly risky professional decisions that lead to the final result: setting up my own company.

I won’t go into technical details about how and when exactly I did it. I want to focus more on the inner reasons that took me there. And those inner reasons are made of only three main qualities: courage, curiosity and enthusiasm. All three qualities mixed together created a powerful drive for change. (more…)

Freedom

Today is the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I’ve joined a cause on Facebook related to this event, which basically aims to raise awareness about human rights by using the power of blogging. On this date, December 10th, each and everyone who has joined the cause must write something to support it. Before reading further on this post, I highly encourage you to read the posts on onedayforumanrights.com and see the details at the Facebook event page. 

When I think about human rights I always think at my first half of life. Until the age of 19 I lived under communism, a dictatorial regime ran by Ceausescu. At the end of 1989, after a series of events often cited as the “Romanian Revolution”, the communist regime was down and the conditions for free elections created. The next years were chaotically to say the least, there was a lot of social turmoil and economic downfall but overall, the human rights started to be respected. It took about 5-7 years until the social climate become more transparent. During that period, we still had bad things running around, like large scale manipulation or social violence – sometimes to the extent of a civil war, with communities of people (miners) violently attacking other communities (students).

Fortunately enough, after 10-15 years, everything is going much better in my country of birth, Romania. But that first period, my early childhood and my primary education are tainted for ever with marks of an unbelievable way of life. Yes, it’s unbelievable now to think that you’re going to prison for criticizing the political regime. It’s unbelievable to think that you can’t leave your country whenever you want to. It’s unbelievable to think that you can’t say what you want to say publicly.

That first part of my life was a prison. I wasn’t confined at a closed facility and attended social structures like school. But the school, the other social structures above the school, were walls of a bigger prison. Every structure of the regime was a twisted and closed parody of what a free life should be. Everything around was a lie, and nobody ever said what he really meant. (more…)