What I Learned From My "First" Business

With all the quarantine downtime, I thought I’d do some deep cleaning around the home. In doing so, I took a trip back to memory lane. At any point in my teenage years, you could bet I’d be carrying a slim black folder with laminated pages. In the folder were sketches of products I imagined every household in America would have: glass tables that’d act as a computer, smartwatches with bezels Apple would envy, wireless earphones. I’d also shared these sketches with classmates who would end up drawing their own ideas as part of this product line. That was the start of my entrepreneurial streak. 

Sure, we didn’t pull a single dollar in revenue or even set out to sell anything, but it set things in motion for the first time. I was passionate about creating something, I had a vision others were following, and we were always searching for the next big thing. It got to the point where people wanted to join my so-called team. Of course, being a teenager and not having made a dime from any of our cutting-edge ideas, the only way I could compensate my “employees” for their design work was by a daily dosage of Icebreakers, which had been written in “legal” contracts (Haley must’ve been mad I couldn’t spell her name correctly).

Nothing tangible ever really came out of doing these things. Years went by, and eventually, some of the products I sketched were rolled out by tech giants, much to my fury because I felt I was robbed of my ideas (I’m still waiting to be given my fair share from the creation of curved monitors). But I didn’t realize until coming across these sketches after all this time that I was tapping into my future persona. Setting out with some ideas I had that could add some value to people’s lives and building a team to help me accomplish that vision showed an inclination that I wanted to be at the forefront of something. I’d inadvertently learned that doing work I loved would never feel like work. 

It didn’t matter if those sketches didn’t lead to something. For me, the pursuit of passion kept me going no matter what it was. It’s something that I wish I could’ve intentionally ingrained in myself long ago so I didn’t beat myself up too much for following a venture that fell short of what I set out to accomplish. Looking back, that passion for doing something impactful has led to my making the biggest decisions of my life. Regardless of whether or not that ended up being the right decision, I’m glad I never stopped moving forward. 

If I had a chance to give myself one piece of advice, it wouldn’t be to invest in Netflix at $10/share (although that’s probably a very close second). Instead, it’d be this:

You don’t have to know where you’re going, just as long as you keep moving. 

More than any tactical tidbits of information that could have helped me avoid embarrassing failures or massive amounts of time, I would tell my younger self this in a heartbeat. For one, it’s absolutely necessary for me to go through failures and learn from them personally. Second, hearing myself say that I have to keep going if I want to make a vision of mine a reality would give me all the encouragement I need never to stop moving, no matter what I did. 

So while my slightly older adolescent self would have considered the hours spent on those drawings and the mints I gave to my “employees” that I could have used myself a waste, I’d say there was no better use of my time or efforts to start figuring out what role I wanted to play. It taught me that my classmates who wanted to get involved showed that people love to follow the herd even if they don’t know why they’re doing it. It taught me that we were creating solutions for problems that didn’t exist—a pitfall for the innovative startups that fail largely because of this hard-learned lesson. Again, no monetary success came of doing these things, but it ingrained little pieces of wisdom I made sure not to forget. 

Now, I oversee more than a dozen people on projects for my agency, and every single solution we solve in these projects is a problem. We’re not inventing solutions for problems that don’t exist yet. We’re creating solutions in the most meaningful, impactful ways. But just like that “business” I started in middle school, the agency isn’t failure-proof. It’s not the end of the road. It’s only one step of many I want to take. In some hopefully not-so-distant future, I want to start a fund and raise capital for ideas I want to create and make a reality. 

But until then, I look forward to all of the successes and failures that are only going to make me a better entrepreneur than I am right now—just like my drawings in middle school unintentionally led to me learning what I know today. For now, I have to take a note from my younger self and keep moving.