My Reality Check Bounced! - Jason Ryan Dorsey [86]
And, believe me, the rewards are well worth the sometimes scary journey. As Anita, age twenty-eight, can tell you, the bigger the risks you take toward your Future Picture, the more alive you begin to feel.
I’ve always liked doing things on my own terms and being in control of my future, so I went to college a year early. I graduated at nineteen with a degree in management information systems. I took a well-paying job with a large technology company and jumped into the real world.
Looking back I can now see that I did all that because I felt like it was what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to go to college. I was supposed get a good job. I was supposed to settle down. But after six months at that first job, I wasn’t happy. That wasn’t supposed to happen.
So, I decided to find out what would make me happy. I quit the job. Then I persuaded my parents to let me run a small Montessori school they owned while I went back to school at night.
The longer I worked for my parents, the more I felt the pull toward taking on a big, defining challenge. The only thing I could think of that got me excited was the idea of starting my own Montessori school. I had dreamed about it since I was a kid, but I was beginning to see it was now or never. I chose now.
I began driving around town looking for land that fit the school I imagined opening. One day I stumbled on to the perfect place. The next day I went to the bank, showed them my business plan and took the biggest, craziest, most outrageous risk of my twenty-year-old life: I pledged my entire trust fund against the loan I would need to start the school.
That may sound simple, but when your parents work their whole lives to leave you money so you won’t have to work as hard as they did, betting it all on an unproven business idea is scary—especially when you’re twenty. I was essentially betting my safe and secure future on a totally unproven vision in my mind!
I remember sitting at the bank and feeling all the stares as I was handed a check for a little over $1,000,000. I know they were thinking, “What are we doing?” or “What is she doing:” At that moment, I knew I had no choice but to somehow make it work.
From that day forward, I didn’t stop, pause, or slow down. I ran my parent’s Montessori school during the day, worked on my master’s degree at night, and started my own Montessori school in the time in between. As overwhelmed as I was, I’d never felt more alive.
I finished my master’s degree about the time we broke ground on my school. I remember spending every day in a little room at a nearby community center making my presentation to parents about why they should trust me with their children’s education. It was intense. My credibility—and age—was challenged every day.
As this was going on, the general contractor building the school of my dreams filed for bankruptcy. He went bankrupt two months before the school was supposed to open! Here I was, trying to persuade parents to give me a $500 deposit to hold a space for their kid, and suddenly, all construction on my new school stopped. I ended up being forced to finish building the school backward; the carpet was installed before the ceilings.
The worst part of the construction delay was that I would have to open the school two months late. This put me in a horrible position. I had to tell all the parents who had placed their faith—and their child’s future—in my hands that their kid would have to start school late. I remember being woken up every morning to my cell phone ringing with