Rainy Afternoon

I've been sitting here listening to the rain and drinking a nice spice tea for the past few hours. Listening to the rain is a big deal here in Texas, since we're in the middle of a huge drought. Right now, there's a lake out behind my house, but it will be gone by morning, I'm sure.

While I've been listening to the rain, I've also been thinking about where I want to go with my career. I'm in the middle of a job search, for a new project management position, but things seem to be going very very slowly, to say the least. So I'm trying to think of ways to get some income going, and get closer to my long-term goal of opening my own tea shop.

I've come up with many options, although I'm not sure how to achieve any of them. I have been working on my tea shop business plan, learning about tea, and meeting people in the tea industry for the past year or more, but I don't seem to be moving quickly enough toward my goal. I would love to be an apprentice to a tea buyer for a major tea company, but I don't know if I'm pushy enough to make the connections to get to that goal. I'm working on getting that way, though--I've been to so many networking events in the past few months that I can walk up to anyone and introduce myself and start talking. So I should start working on the ability to introduce myself over the phone or via email.

A lot of people I've talked to have told me that now is the perfect time to start a business, since there's lots of space for rent at good rates due to the state of the economy. But I just don't feel ready to jump into my tea shop business yet, even though I have the vision of it in my head. I've conceptualized it, but I need to understand the details better before I begin. That's probably not the way of the true entrepreneur, but it's what I need to do.

Somehow I need to figure out how to bridge my supply chain and project management skills into the tea industry...but jobs there seem to be few & far between. And none of them are here in Austin. So I may be packing up my stuff and selling my house and moving on, even though I love it here. For a tea job, I think I would leave. For anything else, probably not.