Joel and I watched in awe as the value of the house we bought nearly 18 years ago essentially doubled by 2008. Yep, the same year our town decided to reassess all of our houses at full market value. The housing market crashed just a few months after the new tax rolls were published.
No one taught me how to put together a property tax complaint. But thanks to the experience of researching and writing discrimination complaint position statement responses and appearing at discovery hearings, that honed skill set, with a bit of help from my girlfriend Google, served us well last year, as I expect it will this year. Rather than just complain (no pun intended!) about how outdated our 2008 property tax assessment was, I took the risk and completed work in an area I never imagined experiencing. And saved us, at minimum, the cost of using someone else to represent us in an area we know so well: our own house.
When Joel was laid off in 1994 because his boss decided not to renew the 10-year the Deck the Walls franchise (and we declined the offer to take on a new 10-year, $350,000 franchise agreement ourselves on a note that Joel's boss also offered to hold, a new level of their working relationship Joel and I simply did not want to explore), he spent 4 months on unemployment while I researched and wrote the business plan to get us a Small Business Administration (SBA) loan to start our own picture-framing store, The Best Framing Company. No one taught me to put together a business plan. However, I knew how to research (using AOL in its infancy); use MS Excel; and write a great story, factual or fictional. Working at GE during that time was also a boon to this process, to this day a key and foundational career experience. I doubted myself every day during the process, but Joel's faith in me and my abilities never wavered. Long story short: we got the loan. Unsecured, based on our collective talent and experience. It was a bit like a pregnancy and birth process: our first joint creation, before our son Noah. With some of the same pain, complaining and self-doubt: but in the end, a great product. And we created it ourselves, from scratch. No stinkin' franchise for us.
What will you do this week to create something that you've never done before: to create from scratch, your skills and experiences manifested in a new area; your own vision, realized? With the sure knowledge that you can come in from the margins: layoff; career and business set-backs; personal pain and crisis: and start once again, with courage, creativity, renewed faith and irrepressible energy that comes from the best source: you.
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