Business Tip of the Month: Follow Your Passion

Although I call this the “Business Tip of the Month”, I seem to make them every few months… this “month” we’ll deal with passion.

Maybe you are lucky and have found your passion in life – but if you haven’t… here’s an easy way to find it. If somebody gave you unlimited funds to pursuit something that interests you… what would that be? That is your passion.

Most people never get the chance to pursuit their passion, due to geography, social, economical or worse, other people or circumstances beyond their control. As for me, if I “won” a million dollars tomorrow – the first thing I’d do is EXACTLY WHAT I’M DOING NOW… except I’d go for a CNC machine shopping spree… I already know which machines and have actually made contact with the manufacturers. For me, if you don’t “live” in your passion, and make people who can help you pursuit it know about it then it’s just too abstract. What would I buy?

• A Trotec Speedy 400 flexx… that machine is just mind blowing… 200 Watts of CO2 + 30 Watts of Fiber with a vacuum table and double Atmos Dual Filters (wood is nasty, VERY nasty)
• ShopBot PRSalpha 144-60 (cutting surface of 144″ x 60″ x 6″ or 3.66m x 1.52m x .15m) with a vacuum table and best damn spindle on offer
• TorchMate X CNC plasma cutting table with water table along with a few other accessories.
• 3D Systems ProJet 860Pro (they recently rebranded from zPrinter)
• A bunch of woodworking, welding and production (both fabrication and video) tools

What would I be able to do with all this? ANYTHING… I can design pretty much anything right now… this would allow me to have the ultimate workshop to design, film and build everything my imagination keeps coming-up with! What you will notice from this list is that I basically have the beginnings of all of them – so to me, it would be like jumping a life raft for a yacht. This would allow me to pursuit my passion on steroids – I have no doubt that I will eventually get this equipment one way or another… but having money now would shave YEARS off my growth curve as I wouldn’t need to make any compromises.

I can build a bed using a Shopbot, engrave amazing detail using the Trotec and build support brackets using the Torchmate – I hope you notice that I’m building using the STRENGTH of each machine to build a final product. The 3D Systems 3D printer would be icing on the cake… and hence would be my last purchase. I love my Cube, my ShopBot Desktop etc… but these machines would incredibly augment my opportunities both personally and on this site… imagine the books I could write and design if I didn’t have size limitations to contend with.

I better stop now but I hope this gives you a glimpse as to where I’m heading… I have a lot of plans for CNCKing.com that will take years to work-out.