The Milton C. Jordan, Sr. Autobiographical Series, Part 2

My two-room office in a commercial building on Morehead Street in Charlotte looked good. Fully furnished with desks, chairs, file cabinets and other office equipment, the administrative center of The Writer's Group officially opened for business in February 1979. In other words, I was obligated to pay $3,000 annually for this office space and I had not earned a dime yet, though I had several writing assignments in the pipeline. In retrospect this experience provided my first painful business lessons. These lessons included the following:

1. Launch a small business only after you know how you will legally organize and capitalize it.
2. Spend capital very sparingly
3. Create multiple revenue streams and make necessities, not desires, govern expenditures.
4. Develop specific, ironclad financial management policies and procedures, or your business income will slip through your fingers.

From one perspective, the decision to leave my position as a reporter with The Charlotte Observer and "go into business" was one of my biggest mistakes. In retrospect, the decision launched a 30-year hands-on learning continuum that has proved to be more valuable than any university education.

My purpose for this series focuses on helping others understand life from the perspective of three learning principles--experience, observation and divine inspiration. I have learned that life provides three access points to knowledge: divine inspiration, observation and experience. As I evaluate all that I know, I conclude that knowledge gained by experience exacts the highest prices. Knowledge gained through observation costs less and often provides deeper insights. Divine inspiration provides access to knowledge that is consistently the least expensive, the most comprehensive and the most beneficial.

Consider this example. Through experience I learned that extravagence contributes to poverty. By observation, specifically reading the works of Robert T. Kiyosaki, I learned that poor people buy stuff, middle class people buy liabilities and wealthy people buy assets. That's how you can tell the difference between poor people, middle class people and wealthy people. Stuff is inexpensive things you do not need to survive and which contribute nothing to your progress. Liabilities, of course, cost you. Assets, on the other hand, pay you. Or a Kiyosaki says: "Liabilities eat you. Assets feed you." Neither experience nor observation empowered me to reject extragravance. Later, by divine inspiration, I learned the seven powerful economic principles that operate in the Kingdom of God and thus became empowered to exit extravagence and begin my journey to wealth. Here's the conclusion. Experience, more often than not, teaches us what not to do. Observation, more often than not, provides insight into what we should do. Divine inspiration reveals how to do what we should do. Yet, we still confront significant obstacles in our journey from self-centered ignorance to ever-expanding knowledge, understanding and wisdom.

For example, during this 30-year period of sacrificing, struggling and suffering, I learned that the following obstacles block our journey to success:

1. Critical information that you need to know and do not know.
2. Stuff that you claim, even believe that you know that just isn't "so."
3. Paralyzing fear
4. Reckless, unplanned courage

During those same 30 years, I've accomplished the following milestones:

• Written for scores of national, regional and local publications as a free-lance writer.
• Planned and crafted the remake of a venerable local black weekly newspaper in my hometown, Durham, NC.
• Taught and lectured at several colleges, universities and community colleges through North Carolina and nationally.
• Built a struggling self-employment venture into a successful home based business.
• Exorcised numerous spiritual demons of faulty mental and emotional attitudes.

Let me be clear here! All this occurred because back in eternity, described by the Apostle Paul as "before the foundation of the world," God chose me in Christ to be holy and blameless in His sight and to be free from the laws of sin and death. Additionally, before knitting me together in the womb of a 20-year-old Spartanburg, SC woman--Annie Lois Jones--God knew me and designated me to become a prophet and teacher in His endtime work on earth, and assigned me to work specifically with the "other guests" in the wedding feast of His Son--Jesus, the Christ. I will write more about this in another article series.

In 1979, I had been married for a number of years to a lovely, ambitious and very accomplished young woman--my second marriage and her first--and we had two sons, six years old and three years old respectively,. Both of us earned fairly good salaries, me as a reporter and she as a local government official, but as I learned during these past 30 years, it's not how much you make, but how much you keep that counts. Like most of our contemporaries, we lived from paycheck to paycheck, not because we did not make sufficient money, but because we did not have the money management skills we needed. In other words, we had very low financial IQs. That was one of those things that we did not know and did not know that we didn't know. Pyschologists refer to this as unconscious imcompetence.

Unconscious incompetence produces constant and challenging pain. Before the end of 1979, I had to move out of my nice office, sell most of my office furniture and begin operating my fledging "business" from our small home on Brookshire Avenue in Charlotte. I learned this lesson: you cannot operate a business successfully on receivables. You need at least three to five years of operating capital. In early 1980, my wife lost her job because she refused to cooperate with city officials who wanted her to lie in federal court about a particular city government error. The sacrificing, struggling and suffering intensified. I learned the following lesson: jobs are never secure; therefore, never count on employment income to support your family's needs while you "make the business work."

Making a business work means more than having work to do. I always had dozens of assignents for national, statewide and local publications. For example, the executive in charge of Special Sections for The Charlotte Observer contracted with me to provide editorial content for these advertising supplements. So the problem was not money, per se, but rather, cash flow-getting the business "income" to come in when I needed it. That never happened. So before long, I was having to do other things to stay afloat. Other things included taking Polaroid pictures and spinning records in local nightclubs around Charlotte.

I learned the following lesson: I had to know both how to do the work of my business and the business of my work. I will write more details about this skill set in another article.

By now, I became aware daily of how much I simply did not know about being in business. So I began studying the business of business and slowly, I moved from not knowing how much I didn't know to becoming painfully aware of how much I didn't know. Pyschologists refer to this as conscious incompetence.

Meanwhile, the sacrificing, struggling and sufferings continued, and in 1981, I negotiated a five-year contract with a local newspaper publisher in Durham for whom I had done extensive free-lance writing to research, write and implement a reorganization plan for this publication. I moved to Durham first, leaving my young family in Charlotte, and send most of my weekly income to them, while I made it on minimum expenses in Durham. Early in 1982, all of us moved to Durham.

Next: The Durham Years