My business plan for True predicted I’d be able to quit my Day Job two years after launch and work online full time.
Sure enough, almost to the day, I did that — I’ve left my great job at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
I had wanted to leave Southern California anyway, but I moved all the way to Colorado to help me avoid a fate I had seen happen to many, many colleagues at JPL: they quit to go someplace else, but then that venture failed and they returned to JPL.
Now, JPL is an awfully cool place to work — if you have to work for someone else. But my goal was to be a full-time writer and publisher, and I didn’t want the temptation of going back to work there again. I worked there full time and worked on True full time, so I was able to accumulate some pretty good savings.
I figure I have two years at my current burn rate before I run out of money. That’s two years to not only stem any bleeding from my savings, but to maybe start building it up even more, expand things at True, and keep doing this for awhile. It’s the start of my full-time “Online Life”.
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I would agree that the Jet Propulsion Lab is a cool place to work — especially if you know the story of its founder, Jack Parsons. Parsons was not only a genius, but was an associate of Aleister Crowley, and was supposedly successful in performing the “Babalon Working” [Crowley’s spelling] which would conjure the Scarlet Woman of Revelation. He said that Babalon herself promised him that she would manifest and that shortly afterward, Parsons would become a “living flame.” Which he did, when his home lab blew up.
Fascinating story (if true), which was told in SEX AND ROCKETS and in A PIECE OF BLUE SKY. The last is a history of L. Ron Hubbard, who hung around Parsons and supposedly stole a lot of money from him. The Scientologists have said that this was because Hubbard was an FBI operative investigating Parsons.