Here's one of the many reports about the 22 million Americans that have filed for unemployment in the last four weeks, as the Covid-19 shitdown goes on. It's Sunday, March 19th, as I write this.
In November of 2015, I was living with my mom, at 49 years old, in a small apartment, in a small town, in central North Carolina. It was a toxic living environment, in a town where I couldn't even get a restaurant or cashier job, in a part of the country I hated being in. My life sucked on pretty much every level. The only thing that made me any money then was doing drawings with Sharpie markers, in a unique way that I invented, that I call "scribble style." Unable to get hired for any job, after filling out around 140 applications in a couple of years there, I decided to create my own job.
Here's a drawing I did of Kurt Cobain, that was in the first, and only solo, art show I've done, in November 2017. The owner of Earshot Music turned it into an online flyer. This drawing sold the day before the show, an hour after going up on the wall, which was awesome from my perspective. Several sales came from that one inty show.
So, like most things, that didn't go as planned. I started, literally, without a dime. I had some art supplies, a bedroom to draw in, a $65 refurbished laptop (still running Windows XP), and a following in the Old School BMX freestyle world, from my blog. That has been my main customer base. I've become a working artist, if not a profitable one. I've scraped by, homeless most of the time, but working drawing, and blogging and continually learning about online and social media marketing, to promote my work. In 4 1/2 years, I've sold over 80 large, original drawings, each of which takes 35-45 hours to draw. I've also sold 100 or so small prints. While this is by no means a raging success, most artists don't sell that much work in their entire careers.
I've done some things right, and made plenty of mistakes. I've had a lot of headwinds from outside sources that have slowed my progress down dramatically. Now, about 4 1/2 years later, I'm back out in Southern California, the place I call home. Still homeless, but I'm able to keep working, to some degree, even while the Covid-19 shutdown goes on, and while the long anticipated "next recession" takes hold.
I've been blogging about the loss of jobs to new technology since at least mid-2017, maybe before. This post, from June 2017, is the first remember doing on the subject. I've been an amateur futurist my whole life, and have watched the big house of cards of our current economy stack up into place. It was obvious, to the few watching closely, that this "recession" would be a bad one, at least as bad as 2007-2009. I personally think it will be much worse. But I also know that recessions are the greatest times of opportunity for many businesses, and especially for starting new businesses.
While I work to build my own little business in today's high tech enabled, hyper-connected world, this blog is going to be things I've learned, and ideas from others about how to start a micro (1 person) or small business, in today's world, how grow a small business, and hopefully how to thrive in the craziness of the next few years. That's the basic idea. I've done several blogs, fairly consistently since late 2008, and they always wind up going in directions I didn't expect at the beginning. So we'll see where this one leads.
My main blog over the last 2 1/2 years, Steve Emig: The White Bear, is creeping up on 100,000 page views, and I thought it was time for a change of pace. I have a couple different directions I want to work in now, and helping people (and myself) start and build small businesses is what this one is about. Lots more to come...
