When I started my first company, I was too ignorant to be scared.
I quit a stable newspaper job to go into business for myself — with only $5,000 in capital. I started sending out sales letters and making sales calls, trying to get churches to let me handle their marketing. I got a little bit of business, but the market wasn’t as good as I had hoped. It was a struggle.
In that first year, my great aunt — Aunt Bessie — died and left me $10,000. I used that money to buy a typesetting company, thinking that the existing accounts would allow me to become stable while I figured out how to launch a newspaper.
I didn’t have a great plan at any point. I had what I considered plans, but they were nothing like what I’d call a business plan today. I was just operating on faith and shooting from the hip. I was still ignorant but I was learning — and I was having fun.
Sounds of old music awakened repressed feelings from my past
How would you see your body if nobody told you it was flawed?
‘What if I asked you to marry me right now, without knowing more?’
We’re neither friends nor enemies, just strangers who share the past
Society needs storytellers to help make sense of a changing world
My bad teen poetry suggests I’ve always hungered for missing love
‘This path leads to somewhere I think I can finally say, I’m home’
When love finally dies, it’s like a fever breaks and the pain is gone