We all do stupid things in life. This was one of my many stupid adventures....

About a year ago I wrote a blog that I called "Banging on the dashboard of the 55 Pontiac", or something like that. The blog was about how when I was 14 years old, I took a hammer and screwdriver to the dashboard of my moms 1955 Pontiac thinking I could "customize" it to look like the cool dashboards I saw in the custom hot road magazines I loved to read at the time. All I accomplished was a banged up dashboard. There was a good lesson in this for me, that I should do my homework before I start a project, especially when I am attempting to do something I know nothing about. I have spent my whole life re-learning that lesson. I still don't have it down.

In 1994 I was into taking the supplement "blue green algae", the one they processed out of Klamath Lake in Southern Oregon. Being the entrepreneur that I was, I got the bright idea that I could make a similar supplement and get rich while making the world healthier. Since I used to make a living growing and selling alfalfa sprouts back in the seventies, and since I honestly believed that sprouts were one of the healthiest foods you could eat, I decided that I would research the possibility of turning sprouts into a pill.

My first step was to figure out the best way to turn a living sprout into a pill. After several weeks of experimenting, I came up with an efficient way to turn the sprouts into dried powder. Now mind you that 1994 was just before the Internet existed as we know it today so all of my research had to be by telephone and the Chico State library. I had to find a lab to test the powder, find a place to make my labels, get all the laws on what had to be on my labels, find out how to get a bar code, figure out which bottles to use and where to get them, find a place to encapsulate the powder and bottle it, and do all that without a computer. On top of that I had to find a shop to grow the sprouts at, figure out the best way to mass produce the sprouts, set up a dehydration room, find high powered blenders that would not heat the powder up as to kill the nutrients, and get an 800 phone number to take orders.

One year later and over $14,000 deeper in debt I found myself sitting at a desk in my air conditioned shop with boxes of "Sprout Complex" piled all around the room. "Now the easy part" I thought to myself as I began making phone calls to supplement distributors and health food chain stores. It took about two hours of phone calls to find out that I had screwed up big time. Every distributor told me that they were not interested in carrying a product that had not already proven itself in the stores. They were not in the business of promoting products. Every store I called told me that they were not interested in buying direct from a grower or manufacturer, that they only dealt with distributors. Talk about a catch 22!

I soon realized that I had put the cart before the horse. I should have researched sales, marketing, and distribution before I spent thousands on developing the product. What I needed to do now, if this business was to ever go anywhere, was to start the long drawn out process of promoting an unknown product. By now I was broke and in debt, not just any debt but credit card debt! On top of all that I had just moved out on my own with half time custody of my son who was about three years old at the time. I couldn't go any further with my sprout project. It was finished.

I remember thinking at the time...."This whole damn project was just me pounding on the dashboard of the 55 Pontiac!" But here's the damndest part of the story....I've done it since and I'll do it again. I am however a little more cautious these days when I try out a new idea. I have to be because I don't have any money to waste. I know that many success stories are about tenacious individuals who failed time and again but never gave up, and then eventually, they struck it big. But what does that say about us tenacious individuals who never give up, but never get anywhere either? Maybe it says were just stupid. I don't know. I do believe there is merit in trying and failing, that there are valuable lessons to be learned from every mistake, and that the journey is often more important than the destination. That being said, there is a point in life when you grow a little weary of the journeys that are rich in experience and want to reach a destination that leaves you ....well....rich!