I don’t recall the exact date, but it was during a frigid November evening when I was in the backyard of my rural home, thinking to myself how miserable I was with my rollercoaster career as a real estate agent in our small mountain town. I was working 7 days a week, on call 24/7, with no real guarantee of when my next paycheck was coming. It was my sixth year as a real estate agent, and I was already quite burnt out from this career. Something had to change.

Running a business was something my wife and I had always dreamed of doing – our ideas ranged from running a bagel shop, to selling crochet items online, to making and delivering homemade to-go lunches, to owning and operating a storage unit compound, to recording an album in elusive hopes of “making it” in the music industry. Inspired by Guy Raz’s book and podcast “How I Built This” – about entrepreneurs telling their story of their adventures and mishaps of starting their own (now successful) businesses – we were yearning to start a business but did not know quite what. We had the motivation and we had ideas. Although some of them were “good” ideas, none of them were “good enough” to actually try and materialize any of them. Plus, with our dismal savings, leaving our day jobs with two kids to feed and a mortgage to pay, was quite a daunting concept and an enormous and intimidating risk. So, for several years, our ideas were just ideas. Until one day, THE idea came along.

My wife and I were congregated at our usual daily meeting spot – the kitchen – talking about our mundane workdays when we eventually veered the conversation to our dream of starting a business (this happened quite often.) My wife told me about a program she heard on our public radio station, where volunteer writers would go into hospitals and write a brief account of patients’ life stories – something that would cheer them up while laying in their hospital bed. I told her how awesome I thought that was, and she replied, “maybe that’s what we should do – write people’s life stories.” At that moment, it all clicked. It all fell into place. A lightbulb went off in my mind… or more like oversized stadium lights shining down its full lumen force on this glorious new idea. I finished the dishes, went into the backyard, and stood under the glistening stars, blinded by what my wife said a few minutes prior.

The concept was simple: we sit down with audio equipment and record someone who wants to share their life story. We would then turn the audio recording into written words and materialize them into a book. A book about their life. Something tangible. Something they can hold in their hands. Something they can pass down to their grandkids, and the kids of their grandkids. An heirloom. A book about their life, as told by them. Our role would be to be the facilitators. The scribes. Their scribes. Writing something real, for someone real. Something of great value and pride to them, and to their families. I love writing. I love speaking with people. I love hearing stories – real stories. (I graduated UC Santa Barbara with a bachelor’s degree in Film Studies.) I prefer documentaries over Hollywood blockbusters. Nonfiction over fiction. My job would be to hear these stories and make them readable through one of my favorite mediums – the written word. I was mindblown.

Not to mention, my wife has already had a long career in newspapers as a copyeditor, graphic designer, writer, and photographer (she graduated Mills College in Oakland a BA in English). She loves copyediting, designing page layouts, interweaving photos and graphics with text, and aesthetically pleasing the reader’s eye. And as a matter of fact – she had already designed and facilitated printing for five books a few years prior!

I was looking deep and wide for a reason why we should not embark on this new venture but could not find any. Every time I thought about “the idea” I was electrified with positivity and fueled with motivation. Every time we would mention it to friends and family, everyone thought it was a great idea, as if a lightbulb went off in their heads, followed by excited suggestions of people they knew who we should approach. Were they just being nice? We had to find out.

We called the nearest SCORE office (a nonprofit organization to help those looking to start a small business) and requested to schedule a meeting with a business coach. The volunteer business coach met us at our house for nearly an hour. We discussed “the idea,” what we needed to do, how to get it off the ground, and what the next steps would be. “The great thing about this, is that you can just start doing it,” is what the coach remarked. “As a matter of fact, my life would make a good book. Some live quiet lives, I lived a loud one.” We could see the wheels turning in his head. After the meeting, my wife and I were gleaming with hope and ambition.

This was my calling in life, and I was sure of it. The only thing that can somewhat compare to this feeling is the day I proposed to my wife. I had found magnetic north, and my internal compass was screaming at me: “This way! This is the direction you need to go!” This is the idea we need to materialize. I told my wife, “I’m not sure exactly where this is going to take us, but I know it’ll be somewhere good.”

It had already been proven that whenever my wife and I put our heads together and work as a team toward the same goal, we can accomplish anything. So… we went for it. We took the leap. We quit our day jobs and embarked on the adventure of a lifetime – and we have been proudly loving it ever since.