I can’t really call this one a miss, because I learned a lot. There’s some other dudes I know who know guns but not business, let’s open a machine gun store! Let’s throw a dart at being an entrepreneur! I now had business skills. And then the day I caught where a senior executive had fucked up and cost the company a quarter million dollars, and the Harpy screamed at me for doing my job (because she couldn’t very well yell at a department head and she had to hold somebody accountable!) I mentally checked out and the timer started for my next dart throw. Seriously, her nickname company-wide was The Harpy. I got a degree, and a young wife and a new baby to take care of, let’s switch gears and throw a dart at the corporate world! And… I hated my first real professional job. Which totally didn’t work out at all, I wasted a year and a half going through the application process at various agencies, finally got hired… and that department then had emergency budget cuts and layoffs the week before I was supposed to report to POST. I worked my way through college at various stupid grunt work or college student peon jobs. I later lost that scholarship because I decided I really didn’t want to work with cows anymore and switched majors. Later I managed to get a scholarship because I was good at judging dairy cows in FFA. My first throw missed, when my own little herd of steers I’d been raising in the hopes of selling for college money got tetanus and died. I moved out when I was 16 and my family moved to a different state. I suppose I’m supposed to be bitter about that and be a good little communist or something, but instead I still got a bunch of throws at the dartboard. And not collect a government check poor, I mean farm poor, which has all the disadvantages of being poor but with the added benefit of constant backbreaking manual labor for little to no reward. I was one of the poor kids who worked that carnival. That’s defeatist horseshit, and another great example that just because somebody crafts an analogy it doesn’t mean it makes sense. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about ‘meritocracy’ and the salutary effects of hard work. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize.

A few hit the target and get a small prize. “Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.

Son of the black sword by larry correia