Engineercampus - My Path from Germany to Business

My name is Rolf Schmidt and after finishing studying, I stood before the situation many find themselfs into: Facing the endless void after jumping throuigh all the hoops during college.

While being able to get a job, I also had the freedom to travel now, because there were no obligations and apointments anymore. The worl laid in front of me like canvas, compared to the draw after number of studying.

But how to start something? Do I chose something popular? Something Fun? Something that makes a lot of money? Do I take some time to do nothing and make sure I get an overview first before deciding?

These are a lot of question and give me a hard time, because I like to have everything planend out. Doing is then no more are running down the path to reach the goal. But now I had no idea where to put the way. I had neither path nor goal. During college I was given all the goal I need: daily goals, weekly, monthly, yearly repetetive goals. It was just jumping through one hoop after the other.

But now I was out of college and confronted with the fact, that I either have to find someone to give me goals, or learn to make them my own. Making them my own being very hard, because of my reluctance to go for uncertainty. Without experience and a detailed map, the goals would always be unvertain and be modified on the way.

So why not get the goals from someone else? Its probably very easy. Just apply for a job and do what I am told. Most cerrtainly I will learn on the way. But two dozen applications and jst two fone calls later I felt that something is wrong. During college I was ofter called that engineers are needed and tat I couldn't same myself for job offers, but this was certainly a market with too many engineers. That should not mean that I blame it for not giving me the job, only to step back and reconfigure my strategy. Do I want to be dependent on other people to give me work? Especially on the increasingly difficult market this would be a vulnerebility for me. There would be no recovery for me if I lose my job in 10 to 20 year, with maybe a family, big appartment, car, insurance: short a lot of responsibilities and money drains.

In that moment I was in the fortunate situation of having no debt, good health, no one depending on me. I would only risk my own finances when experimenting. Thus I chose to find out how to make money on my own. That was less a goal but rather a fork in my decision making.

To make hings short: I'm now in Chile, read a lot of books and watched hours of videos about starting a business, reating value, product development and other topics. My website looks nice and I have a Twitter and Facebook account going and the YouTube channel is ready to host content. I gathered a lot of theoretical knowledge and put everything in place to lift of.

But I still struggle with execution. I still struggle with goal making. But I know that once I found out how to over come this, there is no holding back.

I stay optimistic.