Birthday Reflections

Today is the big day – the beginning of the end of my twenties. Now I know there is a wide age-range that reads this blog so for some of you I’m still a baby – for others I may as well be thirty!

Well since this day comes only once a year – and my twenties have been a pretty incredible segment of my life I thought now would be a great time to reflect.

Just for your own information I am writing this post on an Airplane on my way to Toronto from Los Angeles.

So how did I get here? Now that’s an interesting story – or at least I think it is!

My twenties started with me in the thick of the most challenging academic environment of my life – Engineering at Carnegie Mellon. At the age of twenty I was enjoying my third year of school and spent most of my time in the computer lab programming. I was doing both computer science and engineering so had a full-schedule of tech-heavy classes.

I was living in Pittsburgh – across the country from my home state of California – and I was kicking butt! At this point I was already well on my way to graduating with honors and inspired as ever by my courses.

During my summers I worked for IBM in North Carolina and enjoyed some great evenings on Franklin Street partying with friends on the weekend.

Now fast-forwarding a bit to being 23 – at this age I was graduating with my Masters degree in Engineering and had made a very important life decision – I didn’t want to be an Engineer.

Well – at the age of 24 I had successfully dodged the Engineer-for-life bullet and was traveling about 40 weeks a year for a brand-new digital music company called Sonos. We were just starting to get our business going and I was learning everything I could about my new job role.

At this point in my life I loved every minute of my hectic travel schedule. I didn’t know too many people in Boston so for my first two years there I felt more at home on the road than I did at home…since home really wasn’t home to me!

By the age of 25 I had been promoted to become the Manager of our International business in Asia, Australia, Latin America and Canada. Before I knew it I was on a flight to Hong Kong to get our Asian business started.

It was also this year that I met the love of my life – Daina. I’ll have to do a separate post sometime about how we met as it really is an incredible story. Suddenly Boston was home, I had someone to come-home to and someone to miss when I traveled. Gallivanting around the world wasn’t as fun without my other half and my perspective on life changed a bit as I found myself constantly having to say goodbye.

At the age of 27 I was ready to make my first big real estate investment…but the market wasn’t ready so I had to make a different move – I put my money into domains.

Boom! At that point I can honestly say my life changed. I quickly faced the multitude of challenges that any business-owner has getting their idea off of the ground. Sadly I found-out that about half of the domains I bought were garbage…luckily the other half made my business what it is today!

I quickly started developing properties and selling domains and before I knew it I had a profitable business. In October of 2007 I started this blog. At that time I didn’t know much about blogging and didn’t really read many other blogs – I just knew that I wanted to document what I was doing.

Related posts:

1. Some Holiday Reflections From One Domainer To Another
2. Guest Post By Chef Patrick – Reflections on Being Self-Employed

Tagged as: 29 birthday, 29th birthday, birthday, birthday reflections