Does a Job Have to Be
Traditional to Be Real?
David Vernaglia graduated from Brown University in
1992 with a degree in classics, which he studied for the sake of
learning and continues to study for the same reason. Though
his degree qualified him to teach either Latin or ancient Greek,
he knew the market for both was limited, but he still hoped to
teach one day. Dave looked for a teaching job with no luck, so
he accepted a customer service job with AT&T. To say he was
ready for a change after two years there would be an understatement.
When he was offered the chance to teach two courses at
a private school, he accepted the job, even though the pay was
ridiculously low. He figured the job might be a stepping stone
to a full-time teaching job one day.
After a few months, Dave received a call from a parent asking
if he would tutor her child in Latin; and then a similar call
came from another . . . and another. He became fascinated
with the then nascent World Wide Web and learned to create
Web sites and network computers. Soon he started getting calls
asking if he would be interested in putting together a Web site
or helping with a networking problem.
Dave grew up in a family in which both his parents were
full-time teachers; and his older brother was a CPA working for
a large accounting firm. Entrepreneurship was not a family tradition,
so it never occurred to Dave that he could work on his
own and on his own terms. But with teaching a couple of Latin
classes, tutoring Latin, and the computer-related jobs, he was
1 / A Different Sort of Entrepreneur 13
very much a self-employed lifestyle entrepreneur, though he
didn’t define himself as such. Dave figured that all this was a
stopgap until he could find a “real” job with a “real” boss.
But he loved his “stopgap” lifestyle. He had lots of time to
garden, study Latin, travel, and do the other things he wanted
to do; all it took was mental reframing. Dave soon realized that
his stopgap activities added up to a very nice career as a selfemployed
worker. After all, he had the time and schedule f lexibility
to pursue his other interests, and he was making a lot
more money than AT&T was paying him. “Why,” he asked himself,
“do I want a traditional job? A job can be a real job even
if it’s not a traditional job. Does a job have to be separate from
the rest of your life in order to be real?” His family doesn’t
understand his thinking; they still think of it as a stopgap until
he lands that real job.
Dave called me a few days ago to say he had just completed
a three-week networking job. Though he had to work 21 very
long days in a row, the job paid about as much as AT&T was
paying him for a full year of being whined at and generally
abused by customers. I think his lifestyle business is going far
too well for him to think about a “real job” right now, and I
think Dave agrees with me.
Email:
info@walmartcom.net
