i'm a hustler baby, i just want you to know. it aint where i been, but where i'm bout to go. alot of my dad's friends are businessmen. they travel all over the place and look around for opportunities to make money. they're entrepreneurs. originally for me, the thought was to go to business school and concentrate in entrepreneurship (don't laugh please, my dreams are delicate). but can you even do that? what do you learn in entreprenuer class? common sense?



how do you learn to look at opportunities and make money out of them? i had lunch with one of my family friends yesterday and he gave me a quick run down of what he's done for the last thirty years. he started out working for the government in shipping and exports. then he worked for some factory managing the production side. then he moved onto owning his own trading company. and now he's closed that company to concentrate on real estate in china. alternately, he's going to go into training chinese professionals.



some of my dad's other friends have owned small retail businesses, they've sold window blinds, been realtors, sold furniture, scooped ice cream, a great many of them import/export things. in short, they're all hustlers. they don't go the straight and narrow path of engineer, doctor, programmer. i know many friends' dads who do the more traditional jobs, the ones that are easily explained in a few sentences or phrases. but for some of my dad's friends, i ask them what they do and it's just a big jumble of things. but they make it work. the majority of them are very successful and make a living by finding opportunities and exploiting them.



even my dad, despite being more of a factory owner and whatnot, is an entrepreneur in my eyes because he had to do everything involved with a flute from the beginning to the end. he was quality controller, manager, salesman, customer service representative, importer/exporter, everything. it was easier to define him as "factory owner" but that was hardly indicative of what he really had to do.



college really only trains you for a streamlined type of job. when you initially graduate, you're expected to enter the normal work force. and this is good in a sense, because you need experience and knowledge to open your eyes to other possibilities. maybe i'm being deluded in thinking that hustlers are instantly born, not made. i only see the end products that my dad's friends are and discount all the schooling and normal jobs that they had to go through to get to where they are now. i rather like the mental image of little asian fathers working the proverbial block, trying to make ends meet, trying to build up a little fortune. i want to be that but i also kind of gloss over the twenty or so years of hard work beforehand. dilemma dilemma.