Self Biography of Thomas Fischer

Life in Gerlingen, Germany

My dad is very fond of telling me this story over and over. As I was freshly born, the nurse held me up high to get a good look at me. With my natural game for seizing an opportunity, I peed at her in a nice arc. My dad rejoiced as the nurse had given him quite some hassle earlier. Later the nurse lifted me up again. Employing the strategy of psychological conditioning, I peed at her again. My dad was so happy.

On a side note, newborns discharge fluid out of the urinary tract pretty frequently. However, they do not pee. The fluid is simply birth fluid that entered from their surrounding inside of the mother. Until birth, the mother's kidney cleans the blood. After birth, the baby's kidney starts functioning. Only at this point does urine production start.

Life in Augsburg, Germany

My preteen days were spent growing up in Gerlingen, Germany. That's a small city near Stuttgart (think Mercedes factory). After a few years, a younger sister joined the family, and I enjoyed feeding her the bottle, cleaning her diapers a lot less. Most of my spare time was spent playing with Lego, constructing cars, buildings, and whole cities from my own designs. I sent even some blue prints to the Lego headquarter. A form letter came back stating that due to legal constraints, they were only able to use blueprints from their own engineers.

Back then, I thought that they were really high powered for having lawyers and all. I didn't even know the first thing about law to build Legos. It was my first run-in with corporate craziness. Tell the fan off, turn around to hire a market research company to find out, what customers want.

My teenager years were spent in Augsburg, Germany. That's a larger small town with a train connection to Munich (think BMW factory). At that point, role playing was the rage for me. Actually, due to a bewildering (to me) lack of interest in role playing in my environment, I ended up writing a lot more role playing manuals then actually playing. To improve my manuals, I learned ten fingers writing at about age 13/14. My step dad had a travel type writer. It's one of those type writers, where you hit a letter and a long arm flies through the air and beats onto the page. If you hit multiple letters at the same time, the arms can jam against each other. There is a colored ribbon that is moved through the path of the flying arms. The spool of the ribbon had a tiny little plastic pin to turn the ribbon. That pin broke. I was so shocked and couldn't cope with it that I figured, if I'd put it away quickly and don't look, it's not really broken. My mind hinted at me that I might be deluding myself with it. Though, the panic quickly snarled back and suggested to shut up, unless there was a better solution. Sorry, step dad, I still haven't told you, and I'm still shivering a bit for the moment that I'll be caught for it.

The role playing phase quickly passed for the computer phase. The school offered a computer programming class in BASIC. I had no clue, what a computer was. I figured that it was something cool and vaguely had something to do with banks. Programming was total fun for me. I spent my evenings in the computer lab, read the BASIC manual for breakfast. After half year, my (real) dad gave me my first own computer. A box with 6 C programming manuals came to the winter vacation. Can't snow board all day due to the lack of sunlight, and what better to do then learn about C? A big book about assembler language had me enthralled at the beach vacation on Create, Greece, until my ma talked another kid into talking to me. Together, we found some local teenagers and gals to hang out with.

Around 15-16, a dark aspect of my life arose. My dad had moved to Israel in the meantime. I visited him during my school vacations. One day, I woke up with an extremely painful foot. Everyone was puzzled and suggested that I might have hit the foot on something while sleeping. The doctors were puzzled. At first, they tried to disregard it: You need to rest for a couple weeks. Let's immobilize it for a couple weeks. Let's do some more physical therapy. The doctors started 'feuding' each other. One suggested that I didn't drink enough water. The other suggested that it were uric acid deposits. One doctor said that I shouldn't tell the other doctor about it, because he wouldn't like his diagnosis.

The whole thing increasingly affected both feet, left shoulder, and neck. Some days, the pain was so excruciating, that putting a foot under boiling water would create a new kind of pain that was more tolerable. The school administration had given me the key to an elevator, because some days I couldn't even walk a step up. A teacher made a friendly suggestion that it may be water retention like in old people.

The doctors sent me from specialist to specialist. At one point, they thought that I should stay for a week in the hospital, so that they could run a lot more tests on me, then if I have to come in. I expected to have chockfull schedule. Well, they only did one test a day, which was a total betrayal according to me. One day, they sent me to the basement. As I passed through heavy doors, the radioactive warning signs increased. A doctor with a heavily metal shielded needle injected some radioactive fluid. It terrified me horribly, because I had only seen that in movies, and it was bad in movies. The doctor didn't explain much of anything. They sent me to the university clinic later to remove tissue samples for the electron microscope. I was impressed that I'd end up at a place of research, and electron microscopes seemed like science fiction. When I was sitting in the doctors office, a clicking sound made me look under the desk. There were about a dozen empty wine bottles sprawled out on the floor. I was horrified. During the removal of some of my muscle tissue, I cried for the irreversible loss of a part of me. The highlight was a surgery on my shoulder, which didn't change anything, and broke the final stroke on trusting those docs with anything more.

Life in Netanya, Israel

The same month as high school graduation, I left the country, like the graduation was the only thing that had kept me tied to the place. For the next half year, I lived with my dad. My dad designs factories. So, I would travel with him to the factories, sleep through the executive meetings and run the measuring tape in the factory for him.

One quintessential evening, my dad was out of country in Russia. I wanted to go to a club in Tel-Aviv. His new wife tried to dissuade me due to safety reasons. I snuck out anyway as quiet as I could. As I reached the car, I used the key instead of the remote opener to avoid the beeping sound. Using the key set of the car alarm, oh no! A few miles later, a military road block stopped me. The soldier with the flashlight singled me out and told me to pull over. I did so, got out of my car to look for someone. Another soldier came walking towards me from behind the car. As she saw me, she waved me off to go. That was a good thing, because had she come from the front, she would have seen the broken light. Had she checked the insurance card, she would have found out that it was expired.

As I arrived in Tel-Aviv, I had only some vague locations, as I had never been out there before. A place in a side street seemed promising. I talked the bouncer to let me take a look before paying admission. I didn't like it and ended up chatting with the bouncer instead. After a while, he told me that he is closing up soon, and I should come with him to another place. Wow, that was so cool. The other place turned out to be a lounge with food. There was a waitress, who was so cool. I fell in love. I could see in her eyes that she liked me as well. Unfortunately, I saw her only one more time, before I left for NYC.

Life in New York City

NYC welcomes me at midnight in the middle of the winter. The ground was frozen with ice. The wind was blowing cold. The subway was deserted. I had no reservations, only the address for a youth hostel. Got lost, found a police station, and got directed. A girl, Beth, welcomed me at the youth hostel. I fell in love. As fortune would have it, I actually ended up sleeping in her apartment, not in her room though. She had a boyfriend and another roommate, which was a co-worker. That co-worker invited me over to sleep at his place. Obviously, he was gay, which I was oblivious about. However, it must have been obvious, because he was sleeping with another guy in the opposite side of the room, and giggled like crazy.

The first day in NYC, I meet another traveler in the youth hostel bathroom. We decided to get a room in a basement in Rego Park (Queens) together. The shower and bathroom was shared with more people. My plan was to be a mover. Having spent most my time programming, I realized after a few days that I may not have the physical requirements for the job, and went to a bartending school instead. Mind you that I have never been drunk nor had much drinking experience nor had any decent looking clothes. Yet, the whole thing was more of a mental fun challenge for me. We had a full bar stocked with every imaginable bottle and filled with water.

The final test was to get multiple orders and supply them, while both hands were in constant and independent motion. Further, if multiple drinks needed the same ingredient, the bottle couldn't be placed down. Consider that you have ingredient A that goes into drink 1 and drink 2. Ingredient B goes into drink 2 and 3. Ingredient C goes into drink 1 and 2 and 3. Now, you have to assign your arms to do that at the same time. Further, you want to think about which arm would be better to reach for which bottle. If you take a few drinks like that, you have a wonderful math problem to solve. I was a math and physical major in high school. Needless to say, despite me spending a month distributing over 100 resume systematically to ever bar, lounge, and club, I didn't get a job. The closest that I got to was an Italian place. The owner suggested that I had long hair and it wouldn't fit in. I was totally convinced that long hair fit into anything. Eventually, I talked him down from his 'no' to giving me a try. When I showed up for my first shift, he was nowhere to be seen. I helped set up. Eventually, he called another waiter, and told him to send me home. Oh well...

One Sunday evening, a few friends from Israel had come to town. We decided to go out to a club. Unfortunately, NYC is very dead on a Sunday night. Eventually, we ended up at Nell's on 14th Street. This girl from across the room looked at me. Emboldened by the attention, I went over there. Her friend suggested that I was trying to make conversation. Her statement completely puzzled me. Was she trying to get rid of me, or did she keenly notice that I was indeed trying to make conversation. That was my goal of going over there. Luckily, the conversation carried on. A little later, her friend tried to get me away from her, by asking me to dance. After a couple of dances, I ended up on my hands and knees in front of her, which blushed her enough to give up on her goal of separating me. I got back to the original girl. We were dancing. She put her arm on my chest. It felt pretty good to me to have her rub her arms on my chest. Unbeknownst to me, she was trying to push me away. After that didn't work for her, she asked me into a backroom, so that I would understand her better, when she told me off: "I want to get some sleep tonight." As according to me, everything had gone so well, I explained her annoyed voice with me being way to slow. So, I ask her, 'your place or mine.' Her face drops and there is a quiet for a very long time. In her mind, she remembered that she had complained about not having had enough sex the other day, and suggested her place.

That one night stand grew into three weeks of consecutive one night stands with her. At that point, we decided to move in together to save the double rent. By that time, I had moved in with other friends, where we had occupied a one bedroom. Two guys on the couch in the living room. Another guy and I on a mattress on the floor in the bedroom. Later on August, we got married. As we couldn't afford the vacation in the South to get married under water, getting married in freefall seemed like a good idea. A friend of her had a dad, who was an open minded priest, and might be game for it. On the day before the marriage, we found out that her friend never told her dad. So, we still had the party with sky diving and city hall on the next business day.

Following a job handing out fliers in the street, which invariably ended up with me writing a MS Access database application, I flirted with becoming a graphic designer, which had me invariable ending up at a dot com. The dot com was going to break the whole music industry paradigm by selling the music directly from the musician to the fans by passing the music industry. The musicians would get more money and direct fan contact. In practice, it was one of the first online music CD stores.

Fanny my wife was six years older then me. She taught me a lot of things. Things to question, new attitudes, new ideas, new concepts. Also, my life style changed to take up a vegan diet and daily Kundalini yoga. Both of those things helped me stabilize and improve my health condition tremendously. Some times, I had fever for a whole month. A doctor had suggested that my body would fail by age 23 enough that I couldn't walk anymore. Running after a city bus had become completely impossible. The pain stopped with that life style change. The physical limitations started to become less over the following years.

The paradise of being on my own, having my first real job, being in NYC, started to come to an end. The beginning of the end happened on one summer afternoon, when Fanny came home from work explaining that she wasn't going to go back. She had quit with the plan of finding a plan in the next weeks. Three weeks later, she disappeared to Boulder, Colorado to study writing at Naropa. Half year later a report of infidelity came from her over the phone. As I am socio-sexual, I was pretty happy for her, until I heard something strange in her voice. A spiritual counselor suggested that I should get angry. As I had no clue on how to get angry, I asked him for advice. He suggested that I should pump my navel, until I would get angry. It took a while. After two hours or so, I started to get a feeling that suggested anger. I picked up the phone and got the answering machine. How anti-climatic. When we did get to talk, I followed the counselor's advice to tell her to come to NYC or everything is over. After she didn't want to come, I figured that it was worth a try, but didn't really mean it. However, as I didn't tell Fanny that part, she was left with the believe that our relationship was over. Unfortunately, she didn't share that part of her either. So, I was oblivious of our breakup, for a long time, that was so long, that things were really over by then.

The same week, the landlord decided to finally start the eviction process on the illegal sublet. A court notice was posted on my door. The shiny online music startup was acquired, and my department had been forgotten in the merger plans. Without a girl, job, and apartment, I walked past a Barnes and Nobles on Union Square. In the travel section, there were three major US cities near the ocean and appeared warm weathered: Miami, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Miami didn't have a lot of software engineering positions available. Los Angeles was South of San Francisco and thus warmer. So, I got a one way ticket to LA.

Life in Los Angeles

The LA years were spent working for startup, which all went out of business one way or another. There is absolutely nothing remarkable to report about any of those businesses.

The next phase involved me turning my back on corporate America and software. I had found massage to be my true calling. I went through a vocational training. Massage gave me a lot of things. It is an opportunity to be with people and share a deep emotional connection without having to talk. During a massage people relax and through some magical process, they become more beautiful. At the end of every massage session, there was a beautiful person left lying for whom I felt love. Finally, massage is very intuitive for me. I forget about all my training and stroke patterns. Every moment, the tissue of the recipient tells me what to do, how to do it, and how firmly to do it. It's this intend listening and discovery of beautiful strokes that I never knew about. A teacher once received a massage from me and asked me, where I had learned the current stroke. I told him that it was the first time that I was doing it. Another time at a spa, all massage therapists had to demonstrate their skill in front of the group. Most people didn't appreciate it a lot. A lot of them were fresh out of school. When I started working, I had a sense of nervousness, because I didn't know, what would come. And, then these absolute genius strokes started coming. The whole room grew quiet and intently watched. In the end, I made a couple steps backwards and tried to get my bearings, because I had been so absorbed and was adjusting to where I was. Around me a loud applause erupted. I felt like a piano master after a master piece.

After nine month studying and working in massage, I realized that my savings were running dry. Further, it had become clear that the massage business doesn't pay much, further, guys are rarely requested. Further, quiet guys with stiff necks get even less business. One shift at a spa on Melrose, had only one client. So, for six hours, I received $20 plus $10 tip. At that point, I joined up with corporations and software engineering again. The stint at Movielink was my longest that a company had ever existed with for three years.

While working there, I attempted to get in business with my dad. He had made an invention that saved a lot of money in the liquid product manufacturing process. It still seems like a slum dunk. However, we started having problems working together, which in and of itself is fine and to be expected. The breaking point was that my dad was unable to talk about the problems. He would stubbornly refuse to even talk about problems saying that there were no problems. So, that got stopped.

At the last employer, I had my best super visor relationship to date. The highlight was a weekly mentoring meeting. It was basically an open door meeting to ask questions and get feedback. I have a pattern, where people, who do something better then me, fascinate me. I'll try to get close to them. Then, I observe them. There is usually something that gives them the advantage. They might have had prolonged exposure to a certain topic. They might have a certain approach. They might have a certain attitude. Have you ever seen someone and noticed them being better then you. Well, it's not something intrinsic to them. At least, I found that I could do so far everything better then anybody else in things that I care about. The people that seem naturally talented always have a few things behind the facade that can be copied to succeed them. Generally, when I figure that out about someone, I consider that I sucked that bone dry, like a dog does and I can discard them. It didn't take too many mentoring meetings to suck this bone dry. The following meetings didn't get too boring however, because we were able to have good conversations. There is something, where most people don't think to much about their world. So, when you ask deeper questions to understand situations, they may rattle of their opinion or something that they read, but won't really get into a shared research on the topic. Sometimes the latter happened in our meetings, and it was really interesting. For example, we debriefed one group meeting. He thought everything went fine. Though, I kept bringing up things. After an hour, we had evaluated and re-worked a lot of assumptions and strategies by all parties and came to a rather deeper understanding the meeting.

During a multi-day off roading trip through the Mojava desert along a 130 mile wagon road that had a pass to cross, grilling desert, a dust lake, sand dunes, and water cross, I considered to have a desert retreat, like Jesus did. On the way out, I told myself that to really get going with my desire to start my own company, I should approach it like a business. If a business would offer me a job with no business strategy, I wouldn't take it. If a startup would have a really good plan, they could hire me away. So, I figured, I should write such a good business plan that if I was offered it, I'd work for that company. The rest of the trip, I was out alone by myself. I didn't meet a single person for the time out there. The desert was over 100 degrees and comfortable. The insects were making an hypnotic sound. I enjoyed myself. From time to time, my subconscious popped business ideas into my head. After three weeks of brainstorming, I was onto something and started writing a business plan. The further I planned, the more business issues got resolved. The further I got fired up for it. Eventually, I quit my job. Beginning of September, I started working on my own.

So, far, I like it. I have come to piece with myself that starting a business is my destiny. When I was a teenager, I read about business plans. I went to seminars about entrepreneurship. So many of my thoughts are around starting a business. In life, there are many things, we believe that we should do. We consider becoming a pilot and see many exotic countries. However, there are some things that we simply wake up in the morning with. It's not about reasons and benefits. It's ingrained in us. Even, if this business goes down, I have sense that for the rest of my life, I'll keep waking up in the morning wanting to start a business. There is a sense of accepting that part.

Research on starting a business showed many potential issues, like the need for discipline, solitary work and so on. Actually, experiencing these issues first hand is a completely different story. Having the weight of responsibility to support oneself, having the weight of a two year project plan, and other things is a lot of weight. It's kind of like doing manual labor on a hot summer day, one just can't work as much as on a cool day. It has been very hard for me to take appropriate rest. The first software release was a success by standard of work achieved and schedule of being a day early. However, I pushed myself so hard that I got a cold on the last days. The last day, I worked for nine hours without break and only a small breakfast. The result was that my chronic disease broke out again. My knees swell up so that I could only limp with pain. The pain was intense and lasted for a couple days. It took days to nurse myself back to feeling normal and healthy. My mind's sharpness had lost a lot during the pressure and work. The last nine hours, I might have done it in an hour with a rested mind. To a lot of outstanders, it appears as if I am having a fun summer with all the time that I spent 'not working'. Yet, I really go through cycles of working myself into emotional exhaustion. And, with that added weight, it doesn't take a lot. The following days are spent recovering. No matter the struggle and limited budget that I have, this is what my soul wants. I could be comfortable in an office and paid well with luxuries. Yet, I'd have to die on the inside for not being able to toil on my own business. I have a rather empty apartment, a 25 pound back of organic brown rice in the kitchen, and a laptop to build my business. I can't think of any realistic alternative that would come close to this.