I spent the first four years of my career sleepwalking, only waking to live on the weekends and then resume delta wave rest for the other five days. Eight years ago I woke up and accepted a fact that I had been trying to ignore:

Sleepwalking was not going to get me what I wanted.

I unclosed my eyes and started pursuing the phantoms of desire. I wanted to be able to work from the couch in my boxers, I wanted to be a millionaire, and I wanted to get there by creating and building a software company.

I did more sleepwalking along the way. Initially I quit a job in sales to study software creation by day and to bartend by night but as my part time job became my full time life the coding books began collecting dust. At one point I worked my way into a software job where I promptly dozed off for a few years. More than once I earned money that I could have put into my own personal VC fund and instead chose to waste it.

But today I own my own software company and yes, sometimes I work on the couch in my boxers. I am not a millionaire but we are growing and as long as we continue to focus on writing great software that people love to use that will happen. Some galactically stupid decisions were made along the way, but one key factor allowed me to overcome those decisions:

I followed my passion and my passion always pulled me back on course.

I had no master plan; when I quit that sales job I had no idea what I was doing, but because software was my passion I always came back to it. My nights and weekends at another sales position were spent with a programming book and a laptop. It was not self discipline and it was not that I was incredibly driven. Rather it was that I enjoyed software. It made me happy to see something that I had created pop up on the screen.

Writing software was always my thing. I did it for fun starting at the age of eight when my Dad brought home an Apple //e. During college I did it for beer by completing programming assignments for friends. Ultimately I got a position as a software developer but along the way I did something a bit unusual:

I worked for nothing or next to it just to get the experience.

Six years ago my wife was working for a small agricultural enterprise. They needed an ecommerce website and I knew that I could create such a thing. Their current site was written in a language called PHP so I purchased a book on the subject and volunteered to write the software. Two and a half months later the site I had built went live, and they are using it to this day.

That project became part the portfolio that won me that first programming job. Unfortunately as soon as I was hired I promptly went back to sleep for a few years. I was doing something I enjoyed, I was making more money than I had made before, and I was newly married. Snoozing was the easy thing to do. But after a few years I started to toss and turn, reawakened, and faced another fact:

Sheer intelligence was not going to get me what I wanted.

It seems that being smart and college educated in America frequently results in an odd sense of entitlement, especially if we listen to what we are told in by our guidance counselors, teachers, and professors. We hear about how intelligent and special we are and how the world is just waiting for us to get out there so we can change it and make a fortune along the way.

It is a bucket of lies.

The world is not waiting with bated breath for every year’s fresh crop of college graduates; it is trying to figure out what to do with them. It is trying to figure out how to slot them into a workplace that cares little about their nuanced opinions regarding the socio-economic effects of urban decentralization upon ethnic Romulans.

I changed my approach to my job: rather than whining about how I was not getting paid what I was worth and talking about how I would work harder if I was given a higher salary, I started crushing it. I began going in at 7:30, working through lunch, and not leaving until 6 or 7 at night. I worked on Saturdays and sometimes Sundays.

I did not do it for my employer, I did it for myself.

I realized that I was entitled to nothing; rather I owed a debt of sorts, a debt that could only be serviced if I took advantage of the opportunities I had been given. If I did anything less than use my intelligence, my education, my parentage, and my experiences to completely realize my potential, I would be in default on that debt.

I also started pursuing more side work to build my reputation and to accumulate my own personal VC fund. My wife and I streamlined our spending habits. We did not take vacations. We bought unglamorous used cars. We avoided eating out. We did not get sucked in to buying a home.

We planned and we prepared.

We were ready when I closed a contract that I could not possibly service while working a full time job. I delivered notice to my employer and a few weeks later walked out of those doors wearing a smile that could not have matched the lightness of being I felt.

I have never regretted that decision for a single second, even when we were not sure where the next check was going to come from or when. I absolutely love what I do for a living and I love growing our business. I appreciate all of the incredible people I get to meet and work with and I consider it a privilege that I get to wake up every morning and come do something that I used to do for free.

Anyone can do what I have done.

Not everyone can write software, of course, but everyone has something about which they are passionate and there are other people that share that interest. The key is for people to train themselves to constantly seek opportunity and to always be asking, “How could I make money with this?”

There is one more thing that I consider to be the highly important:

Do not look for reasons to fail.

There are thousands of reasons to not start a business, and there are thousands of things that could go wrong once it is started. Most of these cannot be controlled so create contingency plans where you can and forget about the rest. Focus on the things you can do: be frugal and save money even when you think you are loaded. Answer your phone and always return calls. Be honest with clients when you screw up, apologize, and make it right, even if it costs you. Go out of your way to meet new people and seek to learn from them.

I am on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/chrisrikli, my email is chris@anovasolutions.com, and my direct line is 402.261.0498. I would love to talk to anyone about their business to see what we could learn from each other.