Success Is Not a Destination, It's a Trip
Road Map (2 0f 6)
My cycle of success and failure seemed to take a three-year
period each time it went around. It seemed almost literally as if one
journey was coming to an end, each time, and I had the opportunity to
pay the fare again, sign up for another tour, or take the occasion to
slip quietly out of the station. For four go-rounds, I stepped up and
paid my fare and went out and back again. I'm going to tell you about
those four round-trip rides, and share some observations from along the
way.
How did I get to the starting point on this trip?
I grew up in Indiana the child of two writers, my father free-lancing
out of our home, my mother working at a publishing company. My first memories
are of fear of the normal-ness of the Indianapolis suburb where we lived.
How would I ever become an interesting person, with such dull material
to work with? But my family turned out to be dysfunctional enough, and
I developed some quirks and dysfunctions of my own, and went away to college
a bell-bottomed granola-eating, granny-glasses wearing hippie, and figured
after college I'd find a nice commune to live on somewhere.
I finished a journalism degree and moved to Madison looking for those
hippies and that nice commune, and worked a number of lay-out jobs, free-lanced,
and so on.
I thought my big break had come when I got a job with a tiny graphic design
firm called Abraxas. They had two main clients–a comic book distribution
company, and a comic book publishing company. I joined a staff of four,
publishing three comic titles from that little office, plus the monthly
catalogs and newsletters and advertisements of the distribution company.
There were few other clients of the firm, and they were mostly rock &
roll bands and the like. It was not exactly the real world.
R ead more. Cycle 1: Exploring Partnership»
