How starting Nerd Enterprises, Inc. got me out of a deep depression

Do you think I am a content creation machine? The guys at Formation Solutions do! I don’t think it is because I am that special. It is simply because I figured out what I was truly passionate about and then commenced to create my new life around those passions. Accounting & Technology to put it all under one broad heading. I love the technology and I love the accounting. Put those 2 together and you’ve got Nerd Enterprises, Inc.

I got some great press recently on the formation solutions blog. If you are reading this here on Nerd’s blog or in your feed reader then you may already know I do put a lot of content out there. It truly is a labor of love and at the same time I have often wondered if it was all worth it or if I should be spending more time with my Wife, my dogs, and my PS3!

I think the answer is yes and yes. Yes it is all worth it and yes I should be spending more time with my wife, my dogs and my Playstation3 and maybe I should finally connect my Wii Sport – especially now that I am on Jenny Craig and I’m actually losing weight.

I started Nerd Enterprises in 2003 because I couldn’t stand working for someone else and I hated the idea that someone else was in charge of what I would get the opportunity to do. Something inside of me told me that I needed to go out and create my own reality and that is what I did. I had not yet had any exposure to any real self help material, all of which tells us that this is exactly what we all need to do. I read recently on a wall at the drug rehab facility that I went through 11 years ago that the best way to predict your future is to create it. I cannot think of a truer statement especially in the context of business. I’m sorry but it will not happen – you will not achieve maximum happiness working for someone else. You must have your own business or otherwise be out there as a consultant doing freelance work which means having your own business. I keep hearing this more and more, that the new entrepreneur is the unemployed. That was me, I just started the business before I wound up unemployed. At my last full time job I was incredibly depressed. I probably could have been diagnosed with it. I decided to do something different. Instead of allowing myself to stay depressed I decided to change my life. Trust me when I tell you it didn’t happen nearly as quickly as you just read. As I started to see my life change, my mood lifted. First I got my first client on the side. Then the client was pleased and that lead to a referral. Little by little my business was just getting started and even then if you had described to me what my life was going to look like today I would never have believed you. I would have been content with a lot less and that is because I was still basically depressed. A few years off of drugs and alcohol and not yet convinced I wasn’t eventually going to either go back to that life or just live a very mundane one sober. Today when you watch some of my videos you would never picture me depressed, would you? That’s because I did not stay stuck in the things that were causing my depression. I moved forward and created a whole new life for myself.

These days people want to know what vitamins I am taking to get all of this energy to create all of this content. Matthew Burgess brings that up in his video. I’ll tell you my secret. First, I am learning now that diet is critical to maximizing your energy levels. Most of us eat crap and our energy levels reflect it. Amazingly enough I am finding that now that I am eating a balanced diet I have even MORE energy. But it it not vitamins and it is not my diet that motivates me. It’s the passion for getting up every day and doing what I absolutely love to do and you know something? It’s not the accounting that I love to do as much as it is THIS – writing my blogs and recording videos, particularly tutorials that I really LOVE to do. So far the accounting is supporting me while I do all this, but now that is starting to change. Look at the press Matthew Burgess, CEO of Formation Solutions gave me. That didn’t happen for any reason other than I got passionate about something and acted on that passion. It translated into my sum total web presence and that rubbed off on Matthew. Of course I thanked him and I told him he went way above and beyond on this and he disagreed. He explained that I have really added value to his business with the material I offer absolutely free. So he said it was the least he could do.

Today I do read a bit of self help literature because it helps me stay focused and it reminds me to keep doing what I am doing. Do you know how many times I have wanted to stop doing all of this because I didn’t think it was paying off? Something kept telling me to be patient and sure enough when I read Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It he says the same thing. Be patient. It doesn’t happen overnight and it doesn’t happen without an utterly ridiculous amount of hard work. So I am patient and I continue to be patient. Sometimes I do back off and I write less and I record less to spend more time with my wife and my 3 dogs. Still can’t say I spend any time with the PS3 but I just recently bought a few games so I am carving out some space in my universe to allow room for that. I am petitioning the universe for this and based on my experience I know this will happen. I want to have fewer clients that I personally have to see each week, more that I am sending my bookkeepers to and I want to be able to travel around the country and even the world and do my job from anywhere. It’s happening. I can see it and I can feel it. I want to be able to fly to Fla. more often to visit and spend time with my parents. I know this will happen because it is what I am focusing my thoughts on 90% of the time.  When I do step back from the work it is without a single ounce of guilt. I have a backlog of questions from this site that I will get to. I will eventually answer every single one of them because I have made a commitment to do so, but it won’t all get done this week or even this month.

I started my own business so I could have the freedom that goes with being one’s own boss. Sometimes it feels like I just have a whole bunch of bosses in the form of my clients, but that is rare. Usually on almost every morning when I first open my eyes my first thought is “Thank G-d” for this life I have. I see the roof over my head, look around at my house, then over at my wife and by then the dogs are starting to rustle around under the blanket. I’m grateful for the life I have and that’s half the battle of getting to where I want to go – being grateful for what I have and where I am right now. These are just a few more principles that can be found in almost every self help book you will ever read.

So what gets you going every day? Leave a comment here and let me know – I would really love to be inspired by your comments. And don’t think you don’t have anything to say – you do. If you just read this post then you must have something to say. Inspire me by simply letting me know that you were here, you read this and you were inspired.