I am not an optimist. I am not a pessimist. I, like Johnny Sack so memorably (for me, anyway) said to Tony Soprano, "am a pragmatist".
I don't care when shitty things happen to me, because I can work my way out of them. While I love when great things happen to me, I try to be careful not to let it make me lazy. I really do believe (sorry for the cheese here) that every single person's life is the total sum of a combination of some pretty simple factors:
1. How you react to the "hand you were dealt"
2. The "hand you were dealt" (and no, it's not an accident that this comes second)
I'm not going to expand on that, because if I did, it would just be some regurgitated borderline plagerism of "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell. If you haven't read this book, you should....if you don't read, get the audio book and listen to it. It's very important, and if you have a decent memory, is so packed full of interesting party / general conversation anecdotes that you could fool anyone into thinking that you are an interesting person regardless of how untrue that may be.
So I got fired....at age 30, three weeks before Christmas, from the only company I had worked for post-college. The place before this employer on my resume was TGI Friday's. Shit. So I could either make potential employers think that I am one of those silver spooners who never worked a day until I graduated from college, or I could let them go ahead and assume I'm an obnoxious douche-bag (only partially true) and IF I got an interview, it might just be for them to ask me about flair. God damn it. Well, that probably is totally irrelevant to my employment situation. You just can't find a job in this market...it's tough, but I think we all know this so time to move on...
So no job, no real hope of getting a good one. So then you get the chance to ask yourself a really meaningful question, and there are no wrong answers or other obligations standing in your way:
"What do you want to do?"
Well, I didn't quit, I got fired. So I want to sell websites to lawyers...I did like that. There were things I did NOT like about that...so what do we do? (Again, if you didn't see this coming, you need to work on your foreshadowing detecting abilities) Well, we're going to start a small website business and apply all of the things that we learned in the last 5 years working for this big company.
The things that they did wrong, I can do right. The solutions to problems that weren't scalable at the big, profit-driven company were suddenly workable in my tiny little doesn't-even-exist-yet company. I used to sell websites for $5k and make $1k. So what if I just sold websites for $1k and made $1k....that would work, right? There is very little overhead in website production.
Hey, wait...this might work. And this time, my optimism isn't sarcastic. (If you didn't pick up that it was previously....c'mon...pay attention)
Oh, P.S. The reason this is called "Non Since Harmon Glass" is because that was the last time I was fired. I was 16, and I am clumsy as all get out. I worked at Harmon Glass. I dropped and broke so much glass there inside of 4 weeks that I got fired. Have you ever seen what a 6 foot fluorescent tube does when dropped from a 15 foot ceiling on a concrete floor? Have you ever seen what happens to a 4 x 8 piece of glass when you lose your grip and it hits the aforementioned concrete floor? So that point is, I was so clearly ill suited for that job that when I got fired, it was more of a relief than a disappointment. That was the last time I got fired. I sort of felt like an idiot 16 year old, but this time I had a baby, a three year old, a 13 year old, and a wife that were all counting on me.
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