My seven year itch

No I am not married, though I worked a job that in my mind was more demanding than a wife.So last year after spending 7 years doing it, I quit and decided to go out and start a business. Before I quit I thought long and hard about what I was going to do and given that I have a wide variety of interests this was especially hard to do. Thus with all due respect to probability I decided upon pursuing two business ideas.

The first one is professional wedding photography. The way I went about it is pretty much simple, I covered two weddings pro bono as a portfolio building measure. The coverage of the second wedding was a resounding hit since I out did the ‘experienced’ photographer the couple had hired. The pictures from this wedding were used as cover pictures, profile pictures and were shared far and wide among the guests. This is when I realized that I had the ‘eye’ for photography. Thereafter I have shot a couple of weddings and other occasions. However given that I am new in this field and given the fact that I do not know a lot of people, the clients have been slow in coming. From what I understand the way to get around this pitfall is to advertise and ‘sell yourself’. This is something I am bad at. I would like my talent to do the talking and I hope that eventually this will be the way to my success.

The second one is I.T. consulting and training. This is something I believe many a new company and startups could use given that I have around 7 years of experience in executing a wide variety of projects in multiple domain spaces. However here too I have had limited success. I have analysed this and I can attribute this to many factors, the main ones being a. companies in Goa are not willing to invest in training for their employees and are more comfortable with their employees learning through ‘trial and error’ without realizing the long term negative impacts of such a strategy. b. There are a dime a dime a dozen ‘training institutes’ who give a third rate ‘training’ for dirt cheap rates.

So far ‘success’ has been elusive and some domestic issues have caused a significant chunk from my ‘nest egg’ to be wiped out. Right now my personal finances are teetering on the verge of collapse and new money is slow in coming.

Given all this, I have been asking myself the difficult question ‘Have I made a big mistake?’. So far I am happy that I am doing exactly what I wanted to do but am really distressed about my financial situation. But I would not consider it a mistake since I am someday gonna look back at this time and be glad that I did exactly what I wanted to do.