The road trip.

There’s perhaps no rite of passage that is more distinctly American than packing up a car, taking a couple weeks off, and driving thousands of miles.

There have been countless coming-of-age films where the characters embark on a long-distance road trip, but it’s more than just a trope. Whether it was a family vacation, one last trip with your college buddies after graduation, or a cross-country move, I think most of us have taken at least one epic road trip at some point in our lives.

Part of this has to do with the fact that we are an automobile nation. We’re the home of Henry Ford. Much of our economy was built on the automobile industry.

Some of it has to do with the lack of quality train travel. We don’t have the luxurious, high-speed trains of Europe and Japan. Our trains are often cramped and inefficient.

But in my opinion, the biggest reason that the road trip is such an essential part of American culture is the sheer landmass of our country. At roughly 3,000 miles east to west and over 1,500 miles north to south, the contiguous United States is the fifth largest landmass in the world. And that’s not even including Alaska, our biggest state.

And as Americans, we often take this for granted. A hundred mile drive isn’t a huge barrier for us. Just this past month, I drove the hundred miles to Chicago three separate times, and I drove back each night. One night, I took another hundred mile trip to Fort Wayne the day after.

In some parts of the country, the definition of a reasonable location gets even further away. When my wife and I were driving through the five hundred miles across Montana, we stopped at a restaurant. In the restaurant, there was an ad for a store that invited readers to, “visit one of our two convenient locations in Montana.”

Both locations were two hundred miles away from the restaurant.

But it’s not just that America is massive. Our country’s immense size has allowed hundreds of small micro-cultures to rise up. Within our society are scores of subcultures and remote communities that feel completely foreign—something I learned as a city boy from Indiana when I got pulled over by a cop in Arizona (he asked if I was transporting any illegal people. The question seemed so absurd to me that I laughed. He was less amused).

That diversity can lead to some misunderstandings (see above, see nearly every general election), but if you’re open-minded, it can expand your own perceptions. On various road trips, I’ve been shaped by the selfless helpfulness of Mormons who towed our broken-down van, the proud individualism of the Wapato Tribe in my aunt’s town, the overwhelming hospitality of Georgians, the slick savviness of Manhattanites…

The list goes on.

But the thing is, had I just flown out in an airplane, I wouldn’t have seen any of this. And while a lot of people talk about how driving brings you close enough to the landscape to appreciate it (and don’t get me wrong, the landscapes are beautiful), I don’t think that’s the most important thing a road trip gives us.

A road trip doesn’t just bring you close enough to the landscapes. It brings you close enough to the people that make up the foundation of this country, as different as we all are. We might see them on the news and in debates on social media. But when you drive through those towns and look them in the eye as you pay for gas or order a 14-oz steak to share (the waitress asked, “are you sure? That’s a really small steak. That was in Montana, naturally), you get close enough to realize that we have more common ground than we have differences.

And in this day and age, that’s exactly what we need.

In case you don’t remember, we had a recession a few years back.

Wages stagnated. Unemployment hit its highest numbers since the Great Depression. Baby Boomers delayed retirement, keeping Millennials out of the workforce.

It was a rough time.

According to the numbers, things have gotten better. Unemployment has been steadily dropping for years, and things are great!

But that’s not the whole picture. More people are working part-time jobs instead of full-time, wages have lagged behind inflation, and most Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck.

At the same time, many business owners are having a hard time filling positions. Last year, I was working in a factory. It wasn’t a great job, but it sure wasn’t difficult. Pay started at $11 an hour, with a dollar raise after a 90 day probationary period. That’s not terrible for an entry-level job.

But we could not find enough workers to keep up with production.

In the six months I was there, I saw at least fifty employees come and go. It sometimes felt like we trained a new temp every single day. Some of them wouldn’t come back the next day. Some would last a few weeks and then leave in the middle of a shift.

Talking to people at other companies, that problem wasn’t confined to our factory. This is happening everywhere.

People have thrown the blame everywhere. Some say it’s a symptom of millennial entitlement. Others blame it on outsourcing.

But I think there’s something more serious going on.

Namely, the skills gap.

Employers have a need for skilled employees. Potential employees need these positions, but they lack the skills necessary to fill those positions.

This problem didn’t happen overnight.

For decades, high school students have been encouraged to enter college in increasing rates. Trade schools and apprenticeships might be mentioned as an option, but there is a decidedly negative connotation. The subtext is that the labor force is for those kids too dumb to make it in college.

As a result, college enrollment has increased dramatically since the 1960s. And college debt with it.

College graduates are stuck with low-paying positions in their field (or in the service industry) while trying to get out from the burden of their student loan debt.

I’m no mind reader, but I bet that if we told students that the trades were just as respectable as going to college, a significant portion of them would choose to enter the labor force as well.

As it stands, many competent individuals who could have done well as skilled workers are working at Starbucks, struggling to pay off their student loans for a college they dropped out of.

So what can we do?

I’m not an economist, so I’m barely qualified to offer any suggestions.

But at the heart of it, we are going to have to have a fundamental shift in the way we value labor. We are going to have to instill a value in blue-collar work in our children’s lives from a young age. We’re going to have encourage employers to offer comprehensive compensation and training programs.

We didn’t get into this problem overnight, and we aren’t going to get out of it quickly. But if we don’t move now, things are going to get a lot worse before they ever get better.

My wife and I run a makerspace in our hometown. She often describes it as a “gym for artists.” We have tools and equipment that anyone can come in to use at their leisure, and we offer classes where complete beginners can get familiar with different mediums.

But at the heart of our mission, we want to empower people in our community to find what they love to do and turn those passions into a profession.

And in the time we’ve been open, we’ve seen a number of people start down that pipeline. They’ll take a class and learn how to make their own jewelry, screen print their own t-shirts, or throw pottery on the wheel, and just take off with it.

Within weeks, they’ve opened an Etsy shop and hit the craft show circuit. They’ve started a Facebook page and gotten a hundred likes in two weeks.

Then, they start tossing around the idea of quitting their day jobs and going full-time with it.

And it’s right around that step where most of them stagnate.

In the three years we’ve been open, we’ve seen around twenty or thirty people start side businesses with skills they developed at our shop. Only one of them does it full time.

It’s not that any of them aren’t good enough to live off of their work. Most of them are more impressive than many full-timers.

Rather, the stumbling block is always the actual business of running a creative business.

If you look at my wife and me, you might see two people who are making a living doing what we want. She’s always exploring some new artistic medium, I’m constantly making music.

What you don’t see is all of the hours we spend each week on the actual business part. Bookkeeping, marketing, maintenance, market research, editing our business plan, organizing a class schedule…

Running a creative business is more business than it is creativity.

And when it comes down to it, most people don’t want to deal with all of the nitty-gritty grind of the business side.

Their idea of running a creative business is just sitting around hammering funny sayings on rings or drawing nerdy crossover characters, and the money just comes pouring in. Once they have to develop a sales pipeline or categorize all of their expenditures, the luster begins to fade.

But the fact of the matter is that those things are necessary.

If you don’t reach customers, you can’t make sales. If you don’t research the market with due diligence, you’ll end up wasting time and resources on products with no market. If you don’t have accurate book keeping, you’ll have no idea where your money is going.

And by and large, most artsy types have little interest in those things. There’s usually a reason they majored in ceramics instead of accounting.

But if you really want to make a living doing the things you love, there’s no way around it. The boring stuff is necessary if you want to spend more time on the fun stuff.

And to be honest, the boring stuff is going to take up more of your time.

If you can handle that, then you can think about quitting your job. If not, you better stick to craft fairs.

A few years ago — back when I only played in one band (SPACESHIPS) — I went through a period of time where my bandmates were too busy to play. One was working two jobs to save money for his wedding, and the other was putting in sixty-hour work weeks.

This went on for about three months. And I was bored.

So I started a solo project called Nativity. I didn’t necessarily mean to — the songs just sort of spilled out as I noodled on an open-tuned acoustic guitar. Before I knew it, I had accidentally written an album.

And I was proud of it. I booked some solo shows on my free weeks and started playing out. I added a looper so I could give the songs a little more soul.

Then, things picked back up with my main band. Then, I joined another band (Dad Jokes). Both projects started writing new songs, playing shows, and recording albums. After a couple years of sitting on the Nativity album, I decided it was time to put the songs to tape.

I set up a studio in my practice space and got to work. Within a couple hours, I laid down most of the instrument tracks for the first song. I did a rough mix and was entirely stoked about how it sounded.

That was over a year ago, and I haven’t touched it since.

It’s not that I don’t care about the project. On the contrary, these are some of the most personal songs I’ve ever written, and I’m still moved by them.

But the fact is I don’t have any accountability with this project.

Between SPACESHIPS and Dad Jokes, I have eight other people pushing me to write songs and schedule practices. I have a few local promoters contacting me about shows. Then I have my business. And even though I’m self employed, I have to do right by my all of my clients.

With Nativity, it’s just me. No one else is let down if I go a few months without booking shows. No one is waiting to record their parts. I’m the only person that’s keeping myself accountable.

And that’s bad news for productivity, because I understand how busy I’ve been. I can forgive myself pretty easily for that. If I have to cancel my recording time because I get caught up with work, I let myself off the hook without much problem.

But lately, that’s started to hurt.

I’ve started to feel the pressure of ignoring this project for too long. I’ll pick up my guitar and my fingers instinctively play these songs, and something inside of me winces.

And I’ve realized that something needs to change.

I need to start building myself some accountability. I need to bring some more people into the process—people I trust who will push me to give the project the time it deserves.

But the real issue is that I just need to do it.

I need to set aside some time to actually put sound to tape. I need to take back some of my veg time and divert it into Nativity. I need to push past the excuses and mental blocks and set some deadlines.

And then, I just need to do the dang thing.

Because ignoring it isn’t painless anymore.

My wife and I run a makerspace.

The other day, a man came into the shop to use our laser cutter. He had designed some files to create a mount for his ham radio, and even brought in some 1/8" inch acrylic sheets that he read were great for laser cutting.

I had done plenty of laser cutting before, so it shouldn’t give me much problem.

Three hours later, we were stuck with a handful of useless parts. The laser failed to cut through the material consistently. Some of the edges were completely clean, but some of of them didn’t go all the way through. They cracked as we tried to pop them out of the sheet.

It made no sense to me. I had run some test cuts to make sure the settings were squared away, and they seemed fine.

Apparently not.

We tested some more settings and tried again. Again, the cut was unsuccessful. With only one sheet of material left, we decided to call it a night. He would do some online research, and I would run some more tests on the material.

Let me pause to say that I have been using this machine for years.

I am in no way a beginner. My wife and I have used the laser cutter to make tons of merchandise for our shop. I’ve taught dozens of people how to use it. A couple of those same people used the machine to manufacture items for their own businesses.

I’ve cut all sorts of projects out of several different materials—including 1/8" acrylic. I am well-versed in the machines capabilities and limitations.

So why couldn’t I get this to work?

The short answer is that I’m still figuring things out myself.

In the last three years that we’ve been running our makerspace, I have had plenty of time on all of our equipment. I’ve spent accumulated weeks playing around with our laser cutter, 3D printer, and vinyl cutter. I’ve taught classes on all of these machines.

You might expect me to be an expert.

But I’ve had plenty of problems too. I’ve printed hundreds of models on our 3D printer, but a little more than half of them have been successful. I still face every print with anxiety and trepidation.

Yesterday, someone came in to use our 3D printer because his was having some issues. And even though I follow 3D printing news and read as much as I can about the medium, I still ended up picking up some important fundamentals while we were talking. I even figured out I’ve been using the wrong printer settings this whole time.

And yet, with our combined knowledge, it was still far from a perfect print.

But he said something after the print failed that I thought was interesting. I said, “I wouldn’t say I’m anywhere near an expert.” He replied:

“An expert is just someone who’s made enough mistakes to kind of know what to avoid.”

I liked that. I feel like that encompasses how I feel about most things. I just kind of know what mistakes to avoid. Sometimes, I even let that knowledge inform my actions.

And day by day, mistake by mistake, I figure out a little more about what I should be doing.

And as long as I don’t expect myself to have everything figured out by now, I’m okay with that.

Most entrepreneurs will tell you they aren’t in it for the money.

They’re in it to do what they love, or to have the freedom to set their own schedules and be their own bosses.

But I’m not going to lie—I was a little influenced by the potential to earn way more than anyone else would ever pay me.

When my wife and I started our business, we knew that it would take a while before we would be able to take home a large salary.

But we didn’t realize how difficult the road to a salary would be.

It costs a lot to start a business—$30,000 on average, though our actual figure was a bit north of that. Most of that was obtained through loans, so paying that money back took priority over putting fat stacks in our own pockets.

Once our creditors were paid, we’d be able to pay ourselves.

Some of you probably know how that worked…just when we thought we were out of the woods, something would come up.

Someone broke a window and stole a laptop. A unexpectedly harsh winter shot our energy bills through the roof. Our tech lab computer suddenly wouldn’t boot up.

Each time an emergency came up, it ate into what we wanted to take home.

As hard as we worked, we could just barely make our shop’s expenses. I still had to work outside of the shop to make sure our house bills were paid, while my wife worked the business by herself.

We were on a shoe string budget, and we were just barely breaking even.

Business owner or not, that’s no way to live.

Over the last few months, we’ve realized we need a change. We realized that there was another reason we haven’t been able to pay ourselves…

We haven’t made ourselves a priority.

When you have so many other things begging for your cash flow, skipping your own salary can seem like a really safe solution. After all, we can survive if we don’t get paid, but our electricity company is a little less understanding.

Over the long term, though, it sets a bad pattern. A pattern that we’re still trying to break.

But, if we were to make paying ourselves a nonnegotiable, then we’ll find other ways to pay for the little emergencies that never go away. We’ll do what we have to to make sure our business expenses get paid.

And we’ll finally get paid ourselves.

And if that means a giving the shop a few extra hours a week, that’s well worth the reward.

As the old saying goes, “if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.”

And in the past four years since my wife and I quit our day jobs to open our makerspace, we have learned that that is complete nonsense.

While it might be true that making our living off of things that we’re actually passionate about is more rewarding than working for someone else, the idea that we we’re working less than we were at our nine-to-fives could not be further from the truth.

And it’s not just a matter of working longer hours—though that’s true.

We also do more things that we don’t want to do.

Running a creative business is still running a business. And the business side of that demands a lot more time than the creative side of that.

But most people don’t understand that. And that includes a lot of people that try to start their own creative business.

These days, it seems like everyone thinks that they can quit their jobs to chase their dreams. And while it’s true that it’s now easier to do that than ever, a lot of people aren’t prepared to put in the grueling work that working for your dreams requires.

They think that because they know how to make a slick logo and start their own Etsy store, they won’t have a problem paying their bills.

It doesn’t matter that they have no interest in making a clear business plan, or that they have no idea how to reconcile their books. They’re a talented artist, so people should just hand them money, right?

In the last several years, we’ve rubbed elbows with dozens of people who have quit their jobs to start their own creative businesses. Most of them had similar attitudes towards their success.

Now, only a handful of those people are still at it.

The majority have had to crawl back to their “real jobs” because they couldn’t hack it. A couple of them sell at the occasional art show or maintain a modest online store, but it’s more of a side hustle than a career, tinged with a sense of regret.

There’s another old saying that’s a little more apt…

Your dreams only work as hard as you do.

It might sound a little cliche, but it’s true.

If you really want a life where you can get paid for doing the things that you love, then you need to wrestle that life into the dirt until it submits to you.

And it’s going to do that without a fight.

You’re going to have to work longer hours than ever before. You’re going to have to learn how to be broke. You’re going to have to sacrifice every bit of comfort that your boring day job gives you.

And it is going to be hard.

But if running your own creative business was easy, everyone would do it.

So whether you’re trying to work up the courage to put in your two-week’s notice or if you’ve already quit and are trying to find the motivation to work on your website’s backend SEO, you need to have a real honest conversation with yourself.

Are you willing to endure the long, tedious, boring work of running your creative business? Are you willing to sacrifice leisure and a normal sleep schedule and your extra spending money in order to make your dreams a reality?

If you’re not, you might as well quit now.

I know a lot of people who think they have a handle on what they’re doing in life. They spent years earning a degree to get a job in their field. They have five and ten and thirty year plans. Most of them wake up and write a to-do list.

And I don’t mean to belittle being well prepared—I could stand a little more of that in my own life.

But at a point, I think you can get too organized.

Because when you spend all that time creating a plan and keeping your nose to its grindstone, you might let other opportunities pass you by.

Yesterday, I saw an article about William Wrigley, Jr., made famous for his chewing gum.

Wrigley started out as a salesman for his father’s soap company. In order to boost sales, he had the idea to give away baking powder with the purchase of soap.

It seemed to work. But Wrigley realized that the baking powder seemed to be garnering more interest than the soap. So he shifted his business model to make baking powder his primary product. To incentivize sales, he included a pack of chewing gum with every purchase.

You can guess how the rest of that story goes.

Looking through the annals of history, this is far from the only success story that was stumbled upon inadvertently. Potato chips, chocolate chip cookies, and Slinkys were all mistakes. Even world-changing medications like Penicillin, Insulin, and Warfarin were developed completely by accident.

But in this day and age, it seems like we dread failure.

We don’t want to stray too far from our five-year plans. We turn down opportunities because they’re not “on-brand.”

When we do slip up and make a mistake, we immediately try to jump up, dust ourselves off, and get back on the horse as soon as we can, never taking the time to realize that there’s a faster, leaner horse in the dirt where we fell.

That’s a bad metaphor, I know.

But my point is that when we try to move past our mistakes as soon as possible, we can miss out on the opportunities that our accidents create.

Imagine if the chef who accidentally invented potato chips tossed the batch in the garbage because he thought they were ruined. The snack aisle at the grocery store would look much different.

Personally, the virtue of accidental opportunity has guided most of my professional life.

When I was in college, I expected to spend my life working in full-time ministry. And that’s sort of true—I do work part-time at my church.

But if you would have told me that I would be running a business with my wife, I would have thought you were lying. There was no way I could have seen the path that led us here.

Because we never actually meant to be self-employed.

We thought that we would have long-term careers in education (another accidental path for me, but that’s a different story). We were working in a charter school together. I was looking into continued training so that I could teach new programs.

Then, I got laid off.

Talk about a failure.

But that opened my eyes to the possibilities of working for myself. I tried flipping on eBay. I tried writing jingles on Fiverr. I tried everything I could—until I started writing freelance (aaand here we are).

My success inspired my wife to quit the school—with no back-up plan. For the first few months, she played the art show circuit. She tried everything. She made jewelry, drew greeting cards, made paintings, and tried her hand at a leather wallet/phone case/journal combo.

The latter netted her her first negative review on Etsy—another failure.

In the aftermath of that review, she had the idea for a community space that would give artists and makers access to different tools. At first, she only wanted to be able to use such a space.

But when she saw that nothing like that existed in our community, she seized the opportunity and opened her own.

MAKE South Bend just celebrated its third anniversary, but it never would have even opened if anything had gone according to plan. If I had gotten another subbing job when I got laid off, we would probably still be working in education, slogging through long days of wrangling students and long nights of grading and lesson planning.

I want to gag just thinking about it.

Your life probably isn’t going to end up the way you expected it.

And that’s a good thing.

Our mistakes open up opportunities to us that we would never find if we followed our ten-year plans to the letter. And often, those accidental paths are more rewarding than what we had planned.

So if you find yourself recovering after a stumble, take a second to look around you. You might have fallen into your next big thing.

The other day, I found myself in need of a very specific adapter cable.

Since this is 2018, I did what any tech-literate consumer would do: I looked online. I found one in a well-known box store’s online shop on the cheap. It was fulfilled through an international seller, so it had no return policy.

After a few days, it arrived. And it wasn’t what I needed at all.

I couldn’t return it, and there was no refund option. But, I didn’t spend very much on it, so I just trashed it and looked for the right part.

Then, I realized how absurd that was.

Somehow, we’ve allowed ourselves to be okay with a marketplace where we can enter into transactions without certainty. Imagine walking into a brick-and-mortar, handing over your money, and realizing you didn’t get what you paid for. Then imagine resigning yourself to your mistake and forgoing a refund.

For whatever reason though, we’ve allowed ourselves to accept dodgy customer service for the slightly lower prices of online sales. And personally, I’m tired of it.

The unfortunate reality is that online shopping is here to stay. And that includes all the risk involved.

But, not all is lost. There are a number of ways to ensure that your expectations are met even when shopping online.

The most obvious tool is user reviews. But it’s more than just looking at the average star rating. Look through the one-star reviews. You’ll usually be able to tell if there’s a real issue with the product itself, or if the customer had an issue with the seller. Or, if the customer is just being unreasonable.

If you’re looking to buy a niche product, product review sites are helpful. These sites run their own independent tests on different products and post reviews with their results. Just make sure that they outline their review process to verify that it’s trustworthy.

It’s also a good idea to keep your shopping restricted to reputed marketplaces. You don’t need to keep your shopping restricted to Amazon, but make sure that whatever marketplace you use has seller protection in case something goes awry. That could be a community moderated forum or PayPal’s fraud protection. You just want to make sure that if you do have an issue, you have recourse.

We’re never going to have the same certainty shopping online as we have in physical stores. But with a little know how, we can keep ourselves from being taken advantage of.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to find this adapter…

We all know that our country has a huge problem with student loans. But in case you’re not convinced, let’s take a look at some numbers.

• There is currently $1.48 trillion in outstanding student loan debt—$620 million more than total credit card debt
• Over 11% of all student loan accounts are 90 days over due or in default
• The average 2016 graduate left college with over $37,000 in debt
• The average monthly payment for 20–30 year olds is $351

(Source here)

As if that’s not a drastic enough picture, it’s estimated that two out of five borrowers will default in the next five years, causing many experts to warn of a looming crisis on the horizon.

Looking back, it seems like it could have been easily avoided: many college graduates aren’t working within their field. Many more aren’t even working jobs that that require a degree. College could have been easily avoided, couldn’t it?

Personally, I know that there were several guys on my floor who had absolutely no interest in actually furthering their education—it was just expected of them. One guy even spent his textbook money on a gaming laptop (two guesses how many semesters he lasted).

But going to college was expected of all of us. I remember one of my teachers in sixth grade making a big deal about whether or not we make it into college. And so, when we graduated high school, not going to college wasn’t an option. Anyone who decided to take a year off or getting a job instead spent hours rationalizing their choice to their peers.

This was so ingrained in me that I remember talking about someone going to the community college and saying, “I just feel like they’ve given up.”

“Community colleges are cheaper though,” someone replied.

“So what? Just take out a loan.”

And that’s what so many of us did. Student loans were the answer to everything. They were easy to get, and with all the money your degree would be getting us, there was very little risk.

Once, I even walked into the financial office to ask about any options for further aid. I was told to have my mom get rejected for a loan so I could be approved for more loans myself.

Let me rephrase that: a grown man, whose job was to help my financial situation, told a 19-year-old to go further into debt.

And, as naïve as I was, I was overjoyed. I could take out a loan and just deal with it later. And if we were to take a wide lens at the 44 million Americans with student loan debt, we would probably see this attitude play out millions of times over.

When it comes right down to it, we are in a crisis now due to the financial decisions of teenagers whose brains weren’t completely developed and who didn’t have the experience or financial education to understand how those decisions would affect them in the future.

And for some reason (take a gue$$), thousands of adults looked at those same teenagers and thought lending them money hand-over-fist was a good move.

While we can try to learn from this mistake—namely by educating students a little more before loaning them tens of thousands of dollars and emphasizing vocational options after high school—we will soon have to reap the harvest of debt and default.