I was lying in bed one night and realized I’d hit a wall.
Working as a Product Manager in Taiwan was played out for me. I needed to move on. Or up? I wasn’t sure. But I knew it was time for change.
I had only one certainty in my next step; I would work for myself. I had watched as the benefits of my efforts fell on others. It was time for them to come to my family and me. So I set out.
The opportunities that were there for me were in e-commerce. I would also begin to use my manufacturing contacts to wade into OEM/ODM product design, development, and production.
I spent long hours in that small home office. I had a website and social media. I had contacts. What I needed was business.
Then, a few small inquiries about small OE items. Ok. No problem. Then a few more. Then a guy bought some stuff! And a few more. Small, niche items at first, but it started to grow.
It was about that time when I started my first Team. We were 4-6 riders for nearly 20 years. It was not all the same people. The faces changed. In all, probably 25-30 local riders rode with us. We helped some young riders develop and laid out a program that two of our older riders eventually emulated on their own and created 2 new teams that continue until now.
We put together sponsorships and product testing/development contracts. We were getting paid to ride. Not a lot, mind you. Let’s not go crazy here. We pretty much rode for free and split prize money and random stipends. We all had jobs or were students.
We rode all the National Calendar races and nearly every other race in the country. Some riders joined composite teams for stage races in different countries. They would race somewhere in Asia with another team for 5-10 days and then return to Taiwan and our team.
I don’t have a team now. I packed it in when my son was young, and I was not.
I miss it,t but I value the time not doing it gave me.
Ten years passed very quickly. Life had moved on, and things had just ticked along nicely. Not perfectly but pretty well. The surprises had been mostly good. Mostly.
A little while ago I felt another wall. It was quite a thing, apparently, as there’s a whole Feng Shui thing about it. Or so I’ve been told. Repeatedly.
It was familiar and new at the same time. It was change. It was that, but it wasn’t change for change’s sake. It wasn’t boredom. It was evolution. It had always been evolution in everything we’d done. So why stop now?
There were mental gymnastics and other such daring feats involved,d but eventually, a conclusion was wrought. And now we must set out.
