I came out of college with a great mechanical engineering degree.  I went into engineering mainly because I like to play with Legos’s and thought, huh, this could be a good basis for whatever I want to do in the future. 

Thankfully, I not only learned how to work hard, but also learned that there wasn’t much my left-brain couldn’t handle.

I had an internship before my senior year in nuclear engineering.  Three solid months of work learning all about nuclear energy.  I was satisfied with what I had done and decided that was about all the real engineering (i.e. work on one small aspect of a much larger project with blinders on) that I wanted to do.  Time to move on and explore other aspects of my psyche.

I thought I’d move into the business world in some capacity or another.  At the time I’m sure I thought of investment banking because it was all the rage. However, in the fall of my senior year, while playing intramural football, I blew out my knee.  Completely destroyed my anterior cruciate ligament or ACL.  This is a year-long rehab. I had three months of pre-surgery rehab, then my actual surgery and a full year of post-surgery rehab.  Needless to say, during the time when I meant to convince employers that I could work the front office and the back office, converse with both programmers and customers and jump into a completely different industry, I was relegated to my couch.  In the end, I took the standing job I had in nuclear energy.

Now, I love the product.  Nuclear power is fantastic.  I truly believe in the ‘why’ of what I’m working on and I believe that we can make the world a better, greater place… it’s just not my mission.  It’s not what I’m going to do with my life. I can make a greater impact elsewhere. 

Five months into my full time job in nuclear energy, a friend of mine called me up.  He had this great product idea.  It’s something a lot of people may have thought of (we constantly got the question ‘are you sure this doesn’t exist already?), but no one had acted on it and we ran with it.  We founded our company, Breakout Developments LLC and went to work on it in our spare time.  Essentially, what we’re doing is trying to make a hardware accessory for the iPhone and couple that to a bit of an online API and social media community.  

This was a major turning point in my life.  I got to do things, I got to talk to people. I talked to lawyers, programmers, manufacturers. I got to explain my ideas, my initiatives.  I had a chance to bring something from idea to physical reality!  It was a phenomenal feeling strengthened by every obstacle that I overcame.

Thats when I realized that, hell, I dont want to just go into business, I want to create my own businesses!  I want to change the world by my own hands-on approach.  

However, I realized that I had bitten off more then I could chew.  I found that I can’t just approach starting a company in a serial, left-brain manner.  I need to learn more about business and all it entails.  I need to access the right-brain skills that have laid dormant.