If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing Badly

“If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly (at least at first).” Sounds like this blog, doesn’t it? I’ve run across this riff on an old quote a number of times, but it seems particularly appropriate today. It was probably Seth Godin that said it, though it certainly could have been someone else (or more than one person). In any case, that’s what this endeavor feels like: doing it badly. I desperately need to get going, but I don't really feel up to the task.

I tell myself that it’s because I’ve failed so many times in the past, but really it’s because I’ve started so many times, without actually shipping. I love to start on cool, new ideas, any of which could really pay off in the long–term, but before I actually realize any benefit, I quit and/or switch to a different project. If I could ever stick to something for a couple of years, it would likely be a raging success.

As a positive example, my marriage and family are awesome, and I’m sure it’s because “switching gears” to something else has never been an option. I’ve never even considered it. No turning back, no matter what happens. (And besides, after 19 years and 11 children, I could never afford the child support and alimony payments. Not to mention the loss of my kids and the love of my life!) I’m extremely happy with my family life. It’s my greatest source of joy.

Compare that to my escapades of the past few years:

Just as the housing bubble really starting expanding, I decided to be a real estate magnate. We successfully made an offer on the house we were renting, and got it under contract. We cleaned up our credit using a credit repair service and got 2 loans (80/20) on terrible terms, with an extra PMI payment (mortgage insurance, since we were high–risk). Our monthly housing costs went up by almost 50%, but we owned a home. With my ego adequately inflated, we decided to buy our dream house, for half–a–million dollars. (Hey, there’s not that much difference between $183K and $560K. Ha!) I gave a lease option to a friend of mine on our newly acquired house, and used the down payment as earnest money toward the big house. As the closing date drew near, I got a bad feeling about the whole deal. After counseling with our bishop, we decided this probably wasn't the best decision we could make. (Yuh think!) So we settled for a $305K McMansion half–an–hour south of town, which took us away from our friends and made my commute a nightmare. Brilliant!

Of course, the real fun came when my contract wasn’t renewed a few months later. We were up to a $2,000–a–month house payment, and our lifestyle had been spiralling upward, but we had no income to support it. But hey, we had credit now! So we dug ourselves into debt to the tune of $5K a month. Since I didn’t have a job, I figured it was the perfect time to start my own business. Except of course I didn’t know anything about it. I tried putting on a wealth–building seminar. (Oh, the irony!) I decided to build a website to sell educational videos. (I never finished it.) I tried finding independent contracts. (No luck.) I even stooped to looking for a job (though it had to be remote) with a corporation. (I got a few phone interviews, but I never got an offer.) Finally, after 3 months, I got desperate enough to take whatever I could find (that was at least still in my field), and I landed a contract almost an hour from home. In 3–or–so months, we’d burned through over $15,000 dollars, borrowed on new, high–limit cards, allowed by our “cleaned–up” credit.

After a few months at my new high–paying contract, I decided I couldn’t put up with the commute any more (even though I was commuting in a touring sedan: a Cadillac Deville). So I decided that we needed to move near work, but of course we should buy (since real estate was so hot). Somehow we managed to get a loan for another home, with a $315K price tag. As a condition of the loan, we got a couple in our ward (that’s a local church congregation in LDS parlance) to lease option (there’s that real estate big shot technique again) our first home for slightly less than we were paying, and then we moved back to town. Of course, the lease optionees beat up our house, and never did pay us a dime for the two–and–a–half months they lived there. I couldn’t make both house payments, so the bank eventually forclosed. (We did try to short sell it first, but the real estate bubble was starting to deflate, especially that far from everyone’s jobs.)

A year or so later, after my contract expired, a few months of unemployment, and a new job taken (with a much increased commute time), we coudn’t keep up on the house payments on our remaining home. This time we actually managed to short sell the home, not that it mattered much. Our credit was a complete disaster after the first foreclosure. We moved further away from my job to a nice rental home (we still couldn't bring ourselves to down–shift our lifestyle) and licked our wounds for a while. It was nice to have the mortgage payments finally gone, but the worry of the consequences still worried me sometimes.

After another year–and–a–half or so (my typical length of employment), I decided that I should finally work for myself. I had been having a lot of conversations with other leaders in my homeschool community, who were side clients of mine (or wanted to be), and I felt that this would provide enough income to support my family. So I gave notice of my resignation and made plans to launch an website and marketing company geared toward mission–based organizations (whatever that was supposed to mean). Unfortunately it turned out that there was more than enough work that clients needed me to do, but far less money to pay me to do it. It seemed that (at least in my community) noble, purpose–driven organizations are long on good works but short on hard cash. Let’s just say that things didn’t work out all that well, and a few months later, having previously exhausted our credit lines and having trashed our credit to the point we couldn’t borrow more, we started falling behind on rent.

Unlike mortgage holders, landlords don’t put up with tardiness. Our new, desperation–induced plan was to cut our expenses to the bone, which is always a fine idea, as far as it goes. Unfortunately, we didn’t come up with a lot of great ideas. The best we could do was “sell everything we have and move back home to Idaho near family.” We’d tried that move before, and it had generally worked. Of course, the last time we had done it was 7 years and 4 kids previously. No matter, we sold everything we thought we could get anything for, or that we didn’t really want to move: my Cadillac, 2 violins, most of the furniture, cabinets, anything that was actually ours. We somehow (just barely) scraped together enough money to rent a truck and pay for gas to get us to Idaho. We packed up everything we had left (that would fit) and headed out.