Do the Opposite of Everyone Else

When I was a student at the University of Northern Colorado in 1980, I learned a great lesson.

The summer before I entered UNC, I was driving my car and I pushed the brake pedal but the pedal went all the way to the floor and the car didn’t stop. It gave a sense of terror, because I could easily have crashed my car. What made things worse was that I had just gotten my breaks changed at a repair shop, and I thought everything was in good shape.

I began thinking, “I should learn to repair my car myself, and not rely on others who may not do it right.”

So the next day, I checked for auto mechanics classes at the local junior college. I signed up for an 8-week course where we completely took apart the engine of a car and covered all the major car operating systems.

From then on, I changed the brakes on my car, not to mention many other repairs that seemed impossible to me before. Now I understood how a car functioned, whereas before it had just been a mystery to me.

When school started and I needed a job to keep my financially solvent, I started a business tuning up cars for other students. I made up some fliers and put them on the bulletin boards in all the dormitories. I charged $25 for a tune-up and I was busy every weekend.

That was my the first time that I carved out my own niche and started a new business. My second niche creation followed shortly behind.

My college roommate & I came up with an idea to start a singing telegram business.

We dressed up like different characters and would go to people’s houses to sing birthday, or other greetings, to people. I remember John and I and some of our friends making paper machete cone heads, for our most popular cone head characters, based on characters for the TV show Saturday Night Live. We also had a wolf man character and and unknown comedian character(with brown paper bags over our heads).It was great fun and made pretty good money.

What is the moral of the story?

Most people would be happy to get a job on campus cooking food or moping floors (okay, I did some of those jobs too), while making minimum wage. In the two businesses that I started, I identified a need, auto repair and singing telegrams, and met the need with a job that I enjoyed doing. The benefit was that I avoided being tied down to long hours of work I didn’t like.

And above all, it put me in a position where I could exponentially expand my knowledge and skills. Skills like managing a business, advertising, and promoting myself, knowledge that would have life-long applications.

The moral is, if you want a full, completely engaged life, break away from the herd, and do the opposite of what most people do.