4/12/ 2018: Balancing entrepreneurship with homelessness

I know being a "homeless entrepreneur" seems like an oxymoron.  On one hand, my original drawings of rock stars are gaining in popularity, and keeping me busy.  But they're not popular enough for me to charge a ton of money for them.  I'm making $4 to $5 an hour for the drawing work I do.  That doesn't count the hours spent on blogging and social media promotion, or the hours spent learning new technology.   But that's the game, and I keep at it.

When you're starting a business, which is what I'm doing, though very slowly, you do a lot of work that you don't get paid for.  That's just the nature of things.  If you do a good job, get a solid business up and running, then there comes a time later on where you get paid for a lot of work you're not doing.  I know that, which helps me plug along day after day.

At the same time, I still can't afford a place to live.  I have a little bit of money coming in on a steady basis, FINALLY, which is something I really struggled with the whole decade I've lived in North Carolina.  This just isn't a highly entrepreneurial culture, like Southern California is.  So people around me just don't get what I'm doing.  Most people here don't know a single person who has started and built a good sized business.  I know many.  I know dozens of people who have started successful smaller businesses.  I've worked at some of those businesses in my younger years.  I understand the basic process.  I've seen it happen.  But most people here haven't, so they just don't have a frame of reference for what I'm doing.  They just look at me, see that I'm sketchy looking and drawing pictures all day, and say (or at least think), "Go get a job."  If I could have done that here, I would have done that years ago.  But I couldn't get hired for anything.  So I created my own job.  In the coming years, millions of Americans will have to do the same thing. 

At the same time, I still wander into the woods and sleep in a broken down tent every night.  The temperature has warmed some, which helps in the mornings.  Waking up in a tent in the woods isn't bad.  People go camping for fun all the time.  But waking up in a tent when it's 40 degrees and raining, that sucks.  We've been doing Spring on the installment plan this year here in Central North Carolina.  It would warm up to the high 50's or 60's for a day or two, then drop back down into the 40's and 30's for a few days.

The biggest thing I've learned about building a business from my friends' companies is this:  Get up every day, make a list of what needs to be done, and do it.  Day after day, just put your nose to the grindstone and do the work.  So that's what I'm doing. 

I've been working on turning my drawings into a business for about 2 1/2 years now, and I started, literally, without a dime.  So I've been plugging away for a long time, and now it's just finally getting to the point where other people are starting to believe that what I'm doing may actually work.  Another 6 or 8 months and I should have a legitimate business, a halfway decent place to live, and be on my way to a reasonable level of financial success.  But for now... back to work.