Okay, okay, okay. Since many of my dear readers are clamoring to hear my stories of entrepreneurial intrigue, adventure, and discovery, I will tell them. Be forewarned that given the blog format, which goes against how we traditionally read stuff, it will be somewhat of a challenge to tell stories in installments. I’ll try to break them up into bite-sized portions that can stand on their own. We’ll see how I fare. So buckle your seat belts, here we go:

Once upon a time (actually it was 1979) I moved to Fairfield, Iowa from the east coast where I had been teaching Transcendental Meditation. I relocated because I wanted to participate in the advanced meditation programs that were being offered at the then-named Maharishi International University. (The university’s name has since been changed to Maharishi University of Management.)

Teaching TM was my livelihood, however being a TM teacher in Fairfield was like being a Toyota in Tokyo. Several hundred TM teachers lived there. And, on the other side of the coin, it being rural Iowa where hogs out-numbered humans, there were very few humans to teach. (Plenty of pigs but I didn’t speak Snort.) Basically it meant I needed to find a new way of supporting myself.

The thought of getting a job never fluctuated a single brain neuron. In the past, I responded to jobs and work in the exact same way a cat responds when you try to put it in water. I’d run out screaming, usually in a matter of days, and that’s assuming I wasn’t fired first. My resume has gaping chasms of time between a couple of weeks of employment here and there.* To give you some idea of how work-adverse I am, I was even fired from a civil service job.

So, unless I wanted to starve, there was only one viable choice for me – become an entrepreneur.

(The definition of an entrepreneur – someone who will do absolutely anything to avoid getting a job.)

I had no business experience. I had no knowledge. I had no skills. I had no education. (I was an art major in college.) I had no money. I had no direction. And I had no clue.

We’ve all heard the expression that the key to a successful business is to find a need and fill it. The need I noticed was strictly personal. Having come from the east coast where there was great ice cream, I couldn’t find anything comparable in Iowa. In fact, the ice cream in Iowa was hideous. I called it cow snot. As much as I loved TM, the thought of living anywhere without great ice cream was simply intolerable. If I wanted to stay in Iowa I knew I had to fix that problem.

This is a good place to stop for today. Tomorrow, or whenever I get around to it, I’ll write Act 1 Scene 2.

*(By the way, my record for holding a job is two months. That’s when I was a lifeguard at a private beach on the Jersey shore. Every day I’d arrive late, sleep, read, sun-bathe, body-surf, hustle girls for lunch, and leave early. Since it was a private beach, not many of the rich people ever went in the ocean so I never really had to stay alert. Plus I got enough tips beyond my salary to pay my college tuition.)



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