Grandpa Milo was a serial entrepreneur. For the first half of my career, I thought that is what I wanted to do myself. One of the happiest days of my life was when I embraced the fact that I am an engineer and not an entrepreneur. I was definitely neither inclined toward it nor good at it. After I went back to full time engineering, it took me another few years to realize I needed to attach myself to people who were good at all the business disciplines: marketing, finance, etc. I look back at my career and realize the importance of embracing who you are and surrounding yourself with people who are NOT you in terms of their vocation–if that makes any sense.
I work with a lot of young engineers these days. Many of them are “born” engineers, but a lot of them are not. I think it is a great path to get an engineering or hard science undergraduate degree even if one’s plan is to go into business, education, art, psychology or virtually anything else. That is probably just me, but a rigorous education of any kind seems to help a lot when it comes to the discipline required to perform well in just about anything one does. There is more rigor in engineering and hard science than in most, if not all, other degrees. For the “born” engineers, though, they need to surround themselves with people who are interested in doing the other stuff.
Now that I am on the back end of a career I have loved, I am thinking I really do not just want to quit being an engineer when I “retire.” So, one thought I have had is that it might be fun and maybe even profitable to find some of my old marketing/finance/management buddies and colleagues who might want to do the same thing as me. That is kind of what the BeagleBone Black project is about. A couple of buddies and I have talked about spending a couple years familiarizing ourselves with some tools that might help us develop a product to sell if we can think of something marketable. There would be less pressure to make a profit, but we believe, if our goal is to do something good, we might be able to pay for our hobby, do a little good, have some fun and even make a little money.
Betty Blonde #369 – 12/15/2009
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