Wrapping my head around the possibilities…

When I first started CNCKing.com many years ago in a shoebox apartment in South Korea – I had lots of time to do just one thing… I designed day and night, taking a break only when I actually had to work… teaching ESL is something that requires no thought or preparation (if you need prep to teach the alphabet to kids, you have bigger problems than me) so it was perfect for me at the time!

I know I wasn’t the best teacher but the standards were so low generally that I think I did rather well all things considered. It was never a career choice, just an opportunity that I took when it presented itself to me. One day I was barely making it as a non-licensed midnight-shift forklift driver in Australia, the next day I was an English teacher in a foreign country making 4x the salary with all expenses paid working half as many hours during the day! Yeah, it was that much of a lifestyle change! The scary thing is that this is pretty easy to do and I’ve done it several time in my life… hence being almost 40 years old and not having all that much to show for it compared to others who have set themselves on a one-track existence.

They say the worse thing you can give somebody is an idea… it will change their lives and make them think. The roadmap for CNCKing.com is easily predictable to anybody who has been following me.

Design, Cut, Assemble then Publish. Repeat! Once a year or two, put an aggregate of all this knowledge in a book then start the process all over again! It’s so “easy” and that has been my business plan from the start. It works extremely well!

Recently I started doing lots of interviews on CNCKingdom.com… it’s a very different business model.

Hook-up, Research, Interview and Post. Repeat! Soon I’ll be throwing-in a podcast as well. I’d see this easily becoming a book every year on its own distilling all the knowledge I learned from designers and entrepreneurs. It’s an “easy” business plan just like CNCKing.com has become except on thing I didn’t count on. Having to run after people to follow-through with what they say they will do!

The advantage of CNCKing.com is that I’m really the only one accountable and involved in it – if I want to design something today, I do it. End of story. No running around and if it doesn’t get done, I’m the only one to blame. It’s pretty empowering!

Thankfully I have my design process down, it no longer takes me a long time to make things, document etc… it’s a pretty fun process – the trouble I’m having is finding an efficient way to deal with people, you can optimize yourself but not “strangers” and truth be told, designers aren’t generally the most “on schedule” type of people out there. They got lots of wacky and awesome ideas and wow… the cogs in my mind have been supercharged from all this input. For a guy whose created his own stuff with little input from others to suddenly being thrown ideas from designers, engineers and entrepreneurs from around the world… it’s exhausting to mentally cope!

I use to look at CNC machines and see a project waiting to be cut, now I look at it and see dozens of possibilities at the same time. CNCKingdom.com is like waking from a slumber and realizing the possibilities of your existence all over again… it’s a welcome boost that I wasn’t actually looking for or was ready to experience.

Since I was a kid, for some reason, I always had a very fine idea of my mortality – I don’t quite know where it comes from but I feel every minute of my life slowly fading away knowing that at the end of the day, regardless of what I do or how much I achieve, it really has no meaning or purpose in the grand scheme of things. Will the very last human on Earth one day, exhaling his/her final breath think “yeah, I remember Jon, he spent 500$US in wood building a trike that doesn’t work very well…” I seriously doubt it.

Anyways, I’m trying to put all this together and decide how all this will fit in the future – luckily for me, designing has become like a waking dream – I just do and then realize a few hours has passed when it feels like only a few minutes have!

What I have found fascinating is that all this has helped me tremendously build contacts with entrepreneurs and designers… I was talking to one yesterday and they were blown away by my “achievement” which I told them was nothing special… anybody can design hundreds of CNC projects and stick them in books but very few people actually do. You don’t need a degree, you don’t even need machines (I didn’t for the first few years) nor do you need to know what the hell you are doing. Just do! I’m seriously more blown away by the fact that they are blown away… we have such low standards for ourselves as a species. Like Richard Branson said, he’s so successful because most businesses suck. Low bar indeed.

Right now I’m seriously just fantasizing about what I’ll do when I get a full-sheet Shopbot PRSAlpha (or Standard) router, plasma cutter, massive Trotec Speedy 400 flexx and who knows what else… this is an ongoing dream of mine now that just gets more vivid and urgent as time goes by.

I’m seriously in love with the process of designing things… and selling them for others to make with their machines while trying to promote the engineers designing these tools and the manufacturers who invest the capital required to make it happen. There are so many hats I could wear along the whole process while realizing that I can’t wear all of them and keep my sanity in the same time. I got to figure-out where I fit… as I can’t find a contemporary to model my future against.

I could easily jump into education, sales, engineering, manufacturing… there are endless permutations that my life could go or could have gone looking back. It’s seriously mind boggling how fast you can reinvent yourself and switch gears… completely change your lifestyle, surroundings and relationships given the opportunity.

I realize that these thoughts aren’t something you typically read about from business owners or people in general but like I said, in the grand scheme of things, it really doesn’t matter. I think putting a “human face” behind a business is the biggest advantage any business could have, especially larger corporations, but because they fear of losing what they built, can’t take a chance and the result is one-dimensional thinking that limits their future possibilities.

I’ve found putting things down “on paper” helps clear the clouds hovering in your mind. We are complex beings (some of us at least) and to segment ourselves into A or B just doesn’t work, nor has it ever worked, for me.

People like to say “I’m an engineer” when in reality, they are so much more… by saying “I’m an engineer” you limit yourself to “engineering” in the minds of others. I think you can be whatever you tell yourself you want to become, people will accept it but the challenge happens when you can’t really put a label on yourself… am I publisher? Am I an entrepreneur? Am I a teacher? Am I a designer? Am I a marketer? Am I a beach bum? I’ve been all of these and then some… like I wrote, although it’s an utterly futile effort, I’m trying to wrap my head around the possibilities.