Fast forward... Five years later, I was 15 years old. My Dad called me into the kitchen and asked/told me... "Vince, you are getting older, have you thought about what you want to do for work, after school?" ... It was like lightening hit my mind, and body. For the first time, in 5 years - someone asked me the question that I had made up my mind about five years prior. I looked at my Dad and said with absolute confidence... "I am going to be an Entrepreneur, work with computers and art, and people were going to pay me to do it!!" ... My Dad looked at me, and with the same amount of confidence I had, he said... "Have you lost your mind? Are you going CRAZY?? You might want to get real, and start REALLY thinking about your future..." For the next hour, my Dad and I went around and around about my ideas. His conviction and belief in the idea that I was absolutely loosing my mind, was steadfast and strong. He demanded that I "get real" and STOP dreaming. I was in tears, and could not believe what I was hearing. My Mother urged my Dad to stop, and his pursuit of "truth" was relentless. What my Dad did next was revolutionary. He looked at me and said: "Okay... This is what I am going to do... I am going to go get the tape recorder, and record you sounding crazy... Because THAT is exactly what you are!! 15 years from now, I am going to play the tape back to you, and show you JUST how crazy you are!! That was the Summer of 1987.
For the next few years of school, I was fortunate enough to have gone to a school that focused on workplace readiness. I took classes in business law, and selling. I worked on projects that gave me an insight to the world of entrepreneurship. Creatively, I continued to sketch things, and draw futuristic cars and furniture. I designed fake company logo's and business cards. At that time, computers were still very expensive and not as common as they are today, BUT I never lost sight of the third piece of my dream... "Technology".
Upon graduation of high school, I went into the military, the Army. I never lost touch with my vision and what I ultimately wanted to do... I was "discipline deficient", and I knew that going directly into college would be tough (I hated school...). While in the Army, I went to school for Business Administration, in pursuit of an MBA and I worked tirelessly on wrapping my mind around my vision. At that time, computer programming was not very sexy, this was the 1991-92 time-frame and I was still wrestling with how I would combine my love of artistic expression, "design" with technology.
Another leap... In 1995, I stepped away from the Army and joined the ranks of civilian life. I worked several jobs to sharpen my entrepreneurial skills, a time that my good friend and mentor Hajj Flemings would call "the grustle" time because I was in a 9-5 "grind" to build and develop my "hustle" - my dream, my passion... I did everything from sales, to computer networking support to learn everything that I could. In 1995 something REALLY cool was happening ... The introduction of web browsers, combined my two worlds and Web Design was born. For the first time, I saw where my dream met technological capability. We were now able to build websites, and I knew that the web would change how we did business in some profound way, forever.