Asking Permission is Half the Struggle

Actually, as a wagie, closer to 80% of my energy may have been wasted on convincing the hierarchy to get some work done.

As early as I can remember, even as a young child, I never imagined myself growing up and working for someone else. There were many different dreams, including being an inventor, a chemist, or a pyrotechnical engineer (preferably all three), to name a few. In these scenarios I was self-directed as I planned, schemed and experimented. By the time I was a preteen, it was clear to me that starting businesses is what would make me happiest.

Turned out, real adult jobs aren’t like my childhood dreams… Making ends meet while I figured out how to put legs on ideas helped solidify for me how crucial it is for me to start and run my own enterprises. And I’ve had a lot of jobs. In my mid-twenties I applied for a passport around the same time as a new state ID, the combo flagged me for more information. One of the documents was a (single!) sheet to put employment history. Not only was that piece of paper not enough, it took months to get everything together, and the final product required special postage.

There were many short-term positions, unskilled jobs. They would interest me at first, while learning some new things, become boring quickly, and the pay didn’t matter much. I always managed to keep a longer term position, picking up side jobs for extra cash. The two positions that I held for more than a couple years each actually afforded me quite a bit of freedom and self-direction. If I was showing results, generally I was able to do what I wanted, which helped keep me around. Still, one of the greatest surprises I found finally working on my own was just how much energy I dumped selling myself to bosses everyday.

I am able to picture that evening, early in the Food Pedaler days, when I worked way more than the amount of business coming in. This was a 16-hour day. I couldn’t tell you exactly what made up those hours, though they certainly included talking to restaurants, working on little aesthetic details on the website, flyers, maybe building a menu for a new partner. Lots of biking, not a lot of deliveries, potentially none, though many miles were covered. Probably not the highest quality calories were consumed, though certainly some quality ice cream. It was at the end of this day, that despite working 3 or 4 times harder than I would at any job, I felt amazing.

I realized that I was simply getting up in the morning, excited for all the potential, knocking out as many tasks. Hopefully some were good ideas with a positive effect, and if they weren’t I’d take note and keep rolling. That night I had an epiphany that much of my working life was spent asking permission, justifying, and explaining my labor, and as an entrepreneur I could jump the line and get to work. I’ve loved it ever since.