The Moment I Knew I Was A True Entrepreneur
Sometimes life hits you so hard that you lose direction. Many times, it happens so fast you never knew what hit you.
I was hit. And I was lost.
But let me back up.
My first taste of entrepreneurship began when I was 20 years old.
I was hustling by necessity.
The year was 2000. The publicity market in Brazil was in crisis and I lost my job at my agency.
So what did I do?
I started freelancing, designing logos and ads for a few friends from university.
Business was good, but I wasn’t very serious about it.
It wasn’t until a professor from my University suggested I started taking my freelance business seriously.
My desire to become an entrepreneur began to grow. And life began giving me signs.
With my endless determination, luck soon knocked at my door.
I was having a conversation with a friend about wanting to take my business to the next level and we both realized that we were completely broke. We didn’t even have enough to buy a good computer to start.
I only had a basic crappy iBook (http://lowendmac.com/2012/the-clamshell-ibook-beautiful-but-lacking/) that I bought used a few months before and he was hoping to borrow a computer from a friend.
Literally mid conversation, I received a call from my mom saying a urgent telegram arrived in my name.
She was worried that I might have done something terrible (I had a reputation), so she asked if she could open and read it.
What happened next I couldn’t believe.
“Congratulations! You are the winner of the HP’s Digital Life contest. Your prize is one HP Desktop Computer, one Multifunction Printer and one Digital Camera ”
And thus, my business Xk2 was born.
Long story short (This whole process should be a another article) Xk2 failed a few times until I gave up on it completely.
I was left feeling defeated. I wanted to give up.
Fast forward to 2010.
I was turning 30 and saw my life goes upside-down yet again. The final punch was when a big client went bankrupt and couldn’t pay me for all the work I did.
Life was rough.
Let’s take a look at my debts.
- 4 bank accounts on the overdraft
- A debt around R$ 200K (Brazilian Real or USD 120k by the time conversion) with the banks.
- Two big loans.
- 1 leased car
- 1 leased harley-davidson.
- 2 employees to pay
- 1 office rental late fee
What the hell was I supposed to do?
While I certainly had some pockets of luck throughout my life, I was deep down the well.
I was frustrated. I was mad. I was scared.
After a few months processing my denial, anger, depression and acceptance — my next step was to sell everything I could, cut my expenses and look for a job.
But first I had to be an adult.
I fired my employees. Worst feeling ever.
I used the rest of my bank credit to pay them and some other urgent bills.
I closed the office and moved to a shitty apartment.
I decided to adopt the home office lifestyle and do freelance again and see what would happen next.
No goals
My demons were hitting me hard. I failed as an entrepreneur and it carried into my personal life. Life was a mess with countless broken relationships. I felt alone.
I quickly discovered, balance is king in life and if you have one side pushing you down hard eventually the other side will collapse too.
And then life threw me another good sign of faith.
A friend of mine invited me to a BBQ at his place to introduce me to an advertising agency that was hiring.
She was incredibly nice with me and and we got along great.
One week later I was hired and working as Jr. Art Director inside her company. I was starting to feel good again.
Everyday The Same Day
There I was.
32 years old sitting behind photoshop, working for what could be considered a good salary, but not enough to cover my debts.
My coworkers were all really nice, but something the missing.
At the beginning it was very interesting experience to me. I had worked as an employee only once before and it was 12 years prior.
I learned a lot there and was grateful for the lessons it taught me.
I stayed there for 7 more months. But I couldn’t shake the feeling of wanting to be an entrepreneur.
My boss, the same girl who hired me, called me into the office and changed my life forever.
Again.
Free Soul
“You’re a free soul. You have a Harley. Put it on the road. Get out of the jail. Find your happiness!"
I was sad and angry.
I could not figure out what to do.
I wasn’t motivated to keep doing freelance anymore.
I was needing something new and refreshing.
What if I start another business? But what?
My insecurities taunted me endlessly.
How could I go back to being entrepreneur? I had failed so many times before.
Working as an employee was a good experience but I didn’t want to go back to that life again.
So it happened I decided to go try to do some course.
Whatever I found interesting would be good for me.
I spent a weekend with a group of people and a couch doing all kind of group activity, meditation and sharing stories. I was seeing something new again and start to feeling motivated again.
Then one day, out of the blue, I received an e-mail about the second round of and entrepreneurship bootcamp that would start in Chile. This was 2014.
At the edge of something
I’m from Brazil, this huge country bellow the equator line and dominant in South America. As a result of our culture and even the language barrier (we speak Portuguese not Spanish) I am more comfortable in Europe and the USA than in South America.
I had only visited Argentina when I was very young and traveled to Paraguay briefly.
But the long country called Chile, on the very edge of our continent, called my name.
I never planned to visit it before but it was responsible to light up something new in my mind.
The whole bootcamp experience was a soul changing journey (another article) and there was where this picture was taken.
This is me doing a presentation pitch of one of the projects we developed there.
My team was tasked to design a bus App for the local community. We was 7 people from 7 different countries speaking foreign language with each other and trying to organizing ourselves.
After a week of falling to really start doing something I decided to take the front of the team. I selected two of my best friends on this group and made what I thought was the best to do to have a decent presentation of our idea.
Im not trying to make myself as a hero here, but it is important to guide you to my process of understanding I could be more than I thought.
I built the app prototype with a programer. I designed all the screens and created a beautiful presentation and did an amazing pitch.
We won the competition.
I can perfectly remember my mentor face approval when he said, “You made it! You went from the bottom to the sky in a snap!”.
It may be such a cliche compliment but nothing could be more important to me than that.
At this very moment, I smiled to myself. Despite the many ups and downs, countless nights of lost sleep, I knew... deep down.. being an entrepreneur .. was my destiny.
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Special thanks to my good friend 