Last week, while my family and I were in North Platte, Nebraska waiting for my wife's mother's memorial service, we threw around the idea of moving back there. Normally I'd have sooner stuck the barrel of a Smith and Wesson in my mouth and pulled the trigger. However I found that idea ( moving back there ) somewhat appealing for a few different reasons.
It's kind of like this post . . . as it has a few different reasons because they all depend on each other. This whole idea of moving back there came about as the wife and I sat beside the pool as the kids swam and enjoyed the sunny, warm weather. On a previous visit the idea had popped up but my wife wasn't particularly interested. I think what solidified the idea in her head this time was the fact that she was able to get a hold of and visit one of her bestest-ever friends and visit for a while.
Afterwards she had expressed her thought that perhaps it wouldn't be so bad.
It's kind of like this post . . . as it has a few different reasons because they all depend on each other. This whole idea of moving back there came about as the wife and I sat beside the pool as the kids swam and enjoyed the sunny, warm weather. On a previous visit the idea had popped up but my wife wasn't particularly interested. I think what solidified the idea in her head this time was the fact that she was able to get a hold of and visit one of her bestest-ever friends and visit for a while.
Afterwards she had expressed her thought that perhaps it wouldn't be so bad.
My biggest concern is that the town is really quite small. It's community is largely based on the railroad, the service industry ( hotels, restaurants, and tourism ), and agriculture. Roughly 25K people live there. So, it's pretty small by the standards my family has experienced over the last 16 years. So, given it's size, you may understand that what I fear the most is that it would be very difficult to find a job in my line of work. Right now I have no burning desire to get out of my area of expertise. I invested a lot of time and money to do what I do. I certainly have no desire to ever work in the restaurant industry again. Getting a job on the railroad takes the right connections ( which I don't have ) and has little security once you get one. They lay off frequently - and I've had my fair share of lay offs and I don't look forward to the prospect of any in the future.
However, there are positive points. The cost of living is relatively small. A decent home can be purchased well below the cost of other, much larger cities. The city is free of the type of violent crime that we have certainly seen our fair share of here in Topeka. We both have family within the state and my wife has family in and near the city. Since my wife is a nurse she can essentially take those skills anywhere. All she has to do is obtain a license to work within the state she resides. As we talked it became clear that this wasn't something we'd be able to do on the spur of the moment. We wouldn't be able to just pick up and move without some sort of planning. So I suggested that we take a year to solidify things, save some money to be used for the move, and prepare for it if after a year we still wanted to do it. As I said, my biggest concern is employment.
I've talked a bit about my desire to do something of my own. And I have been actively working on it trying to flesh out the project that will ultimately become the center a business. I'm not sure where I actually heard or read this, but it speaks to the point that if a deadline isn't set then there is no attainable goal and therefore the idea will fail or spiral into obscurity do to lack of attention. Acting upon that statement, I've decided that I'm going to build a blend of some of the things I've discussed such as social networking, social ranking and bookmarking, web 2.0, and a few others that I will touch on as time goes by. Also, by making this announcement I'm hoping it will hold me a little more accountable. While I'm not 100 percent sure I want to divulge much more than that ( at this time - sorry I'm being so secretive ) I'll most likely let you in on the progress as time goes by. So ultimately, should our plan to move become reality I won't have to find a job. Instead I'll have a business that will become my job.
A year may not necessarily be enough time to do this, but it's a chance that I'm willing to take. If Guy Kawasaki can build Truemors in roughly eight weeks with 12K, I think that little, old me can do something in a year. And that's not a slam against him - that's a statement meant to speak to the ease, affordability, and timeliness that the Internet provides as a means to building a business by someone with some experience and knowhow.
Another positive point to all of this is that it adds one more goal that I've been working on. Since I've been working in this industry I've always had to learn new things. There's always some new programming language or framework or tool on the horizon. In the technology field you either embrace it and learn it or become unmarketable and unemployable. I've been spending a little time learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails. For those of you who haven't the foggiest idea of what that is, it is a programming language ( Ruby ) and a framework ( Ruby on Rails ) for building web applications. In the end what I hope to see is that after a year I'll have merged these three goals: building an independent business on a product while adding yet another techie thing to my toolset and moving on.
However, there are positive points. The cost of living is relatively small. A decent home can be purchased well below the cost of other, much larger cities. The city is free of the type of violent crime that we have certainly seen our fair share of here in Topeka. We both have family within the state and my wife has family in and near the city. Since my wife is a nurse she can essentially take those skills anywhere. All she has to do is obtain a license to work within the state she resides. As we talked it became clear that this wasn't something we'd be able to do on the spur of the moment. We wouldn't be able to just pick up and move without some sort of planning. So I suggested that we take a year to solidify things, save some money to be used for the move, and prepare for it if after a year we still wanted to do it. As I said, my biggest concern is employment.
I've talked a bit about my desire to do something of my own. And I have been actively working on it trying to flesh out the project that will ultimately become the center a business. I'm not sure where I actually heard or read this, but it speaks to the point that if a deadline isn't set then there is no attainable goal and therefore the idea will fail or spiral into obscurity do to lack of attention. Acting upon that statement, I've decided that I'm going to build a blend of some of the things I've discussed such as social networking, social ranking and bookmarking, web 2.0, and a few others that I will touch on as time goes by. Also, by making this announcement I'm hoping it will hold me a little more accountable. While I'm not 100 percent sure I want to divulge much more than that ( at this time - sorry I'm being so secretive ) I'll most likely let you in on the progress as time goes by. So ultimately, should our plan to move become reality I won't have to find a job. Instead I'll have a business that will become my job.
A year may not necessarily be enough time to do this, but it's a chance that I'm willing to take. If Guy Kawasaki can build Truemors in roughly eight weeks with 12K, I think that little, old me can do something in a year. And that's not a slam against him - that's a statement meant to speak to the ease, affordability, and timeliness that the Internet provides as a means to building a business by someone with some experience and knowhow.
Another positive point to all of this is that it adds one more goal that I've been working on. Since I've been working in this industry I've always had to learn new things. There's always some new programming language or framework or tool on the horizon. In the technology field you either embrace it and learn it or become unmarketable and unemployable. I've been spending a little time learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails. For those of you who haven't the foggiest idea of what that is, it is a programming language ( Ruby ) and a framework ( Ruby on Rails ) for building web applications. In the end what I hope to see is that after a year I'll have merged these three goals: building an independent business on a product while adding yet another techie thing to my toolset and moving on.
