My Internet Success Story - Part 2

Taking My First Ride on the Information Highway

This was a painfully slow process as we were ticking along at 14.4 kbps. Most of us now live in the age of broadband access. If you’ve never downloaded at 14.4, consider yourself very lucky indeed.

At night I started playing around with the Internet a bit. Pretty soon I discovered ESPN.com…the Holy Grail of Sports for a young man with this addiction. Now, back in the day on my 14.4 it took a good 5 minutes to download the home page.

Start the download; go grab a cup of coffee. Click on your first article; go make a sandwich, etc. It was a slow process, but now I could have any sports information that I wanted any time of day or night.

I spend hours surfing the Internet reading about all my favorite sports. I was fascinated by the instant information potential of the ‘net. You could find just about anything and have it right on your computer from anywhere in the world.

Thus began my love affair with the Internet. A powerful tool for finding any kind of information was now at my fingertips.

Miserable in the Daily Grind

About this time I moved into a position as IT Director/CAD Manager for the firm. This gave me a bit of a reprieve from the day-to-day monotony of just churning out engineering blueprints. I got to learn server technology, TCP/IP and how to manage an office full of computers.

As long as I was learning new things, I was fairly content. By nature I am not a grinder. By grinder I mean somebody that can just go into a traditional 9-5 environment and grind away at the job.

I’ve met plenty of people that thrive in this scenario. They don’t mind just sitting at a desk for hour after hour knocking out their work and completing tasks. Personally, I go just a bit crazy in this type of situation.

I like to have a lot of movement. I get bored of the same thing after about 10 minutes or so. My work preference is to work in spurts.

I’m a natural sprinter when it comes to work, not a marathon runner. I come out of the gate fast, blow it all out over a short distance and then shut it down to rest.

This kind of work technique was not going to work for me in my Dad’s firm. These guys were grinders to the core. It was a whole office of people capable of piloting a desk for hours on end without coming up for air.

It didn’t take me too long to figure out that I needed an out, and quickly.

Influencing Factors

My Dad must have seen this part of my personality as well. He is an incredible man, a hard worker, and a fabulous communicator. He was certainly the glue that held the office together. They called him the Man with the Silver Tongue. He could go into a hostile meeting with clients and come out with everybody eating out of his hands.

On the other side, he was very cautious in business and finances. Eventually he sold him business and went back to his other love…teaching. He is now a PhD professor of Engineering at the University of Florida. I definitely received my liking for electronics and all things technical from him.

My Mom on the other hand was an Interior Designer and incredible writer. From her I received the creative side of my personality. She loves to make things beautiful and surround herself with environments that foster creative thoughts. She is also very intelligent and analytical in her own right.

One other figure deserves mention here and that is my step-dad Doug. He is an entrepreneur and has incredible street smarts for business. He is a risk taker and is willing to go all out after and idea that he thinks will work. He helped me to fire out without fear.

All of these influences came crashing together in my own life. My Dad seeing that I was fairly miserable at the office made possible the starting of my first company, a web design corporation.