Do What You Want (Tradecraft)

There's a Mark Twain quote, "Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life." He also said, "All you need in life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure." That tells me he would have intuitively understood the game trade.

I talk about numbers and metrics and policies and procedures near endlessly. The thing I don't mention, because it seems like we have an overabundance of it rather than technical rigor, is doing what you want. I didn't say do what you love, because passion is fleeting. It comes and goes. You may be doing this because you love Magic or Dungeons & Dragons, but you may have periods in your life where that passion flags and you think about ending the relationship. D&D 4 almost made me pack it in.

Doing what you want is a bit more low key. It means surrounding yourself with the type of product you want to sell. It means being around the type of customers who make you happy. It means choosing staff who enrich your life and help fulfill your vision. I had an employee I let go simply because he made me miserable. Every day my life was worse because he was in it. And you know what? I didn't want to do it any more, so I fired him and gladly paid his unemployment, simply because he was a black hole of human emotion.

Doing what you want also means taking the degree of risk that makes you happy. If you have trust issues, you may never hire more than an employee or two. That's fine. Own it. You're a one man shop. Maybe you get to go home and have dinner every evening and you don't have PPTQ bastards giving you one star reviews because your prize payout is crappy, because you don't run events.

If you really like systems and processes, you may never be happy until you have a half dozen stores. Everyone will tell you such an enterprise is a disaster, but it really means it would be disastrous for them. 

When it comes to debt, I'm pretty miserable as we reach the half way point paying off our construction loans. I'm miserable because I like a dynamic environment where I can dodge and weave and have various initiatives in the works, all of which cost some money. I've got a white board with $20,000 worth of capital projects and I could easily add that amount just in inventory value without blinking. No money means I have less space to dodge and weave, even though my decisions will have long term positive effects. For me, slow and steady is maddening, but it might be just the thing for you.

So when you're reading my stuff, or getting advice from other store owners, you really need to weigh what they're saying against what you personally want to do. That's because this is generally a bad investment of time and capital. Your time is more valuable elsewhere, your money worth more invested differently. You will likely defer retirement and work many more years than if you had a conventional career. That means you better damn well enjoy what you're doing now, since you'll be doing it for quite some time while others are lying on their beach (if they don't die of stress related diseases from working for others first).