Can You Slay the Demons of Overwork?

Mike Baker always wanted to run his own business. Growing up in northwest Arkansas, in the shadow of Wal-Mart and of Tyson Foods, he adopted a pretty bleak view of living his life as somebody else's employee. "I just knew that they would never pay you enough to get ahead," he recalls. "It wouldn't be in their interests."

Even so, Baker hadn't yet made his breakaway when he was already in his midthirties. His first career had already run its course: a 13-year tour of duty in the U.S. Army, including a successful run as an Oklahoma-based recruiter. That career ended when he quit in the early 1990s, rather than accept a transfer to Korea. Afterward, with only a high-school education, he bounced around in various jobs and ended up working on the loading dock at a Levi Strauss denim plant in Fayetteville, Arkansas. It was sweaty, repetitive work that paid $9.75 an hour, without even the pretense of a career track.

Eager to try something else, Baker began listing oddities for sale on eBay, the online auction service. He fiddled with eBay for a couple of hours before work each day; he checked his listings the moment he got home. Before long, he realized that this might be his big chance. A box of 1,000 miscellaneous mass-produced photos and posters, which he had acquired for less than $100, turned out to be a gold mine when the pictures were listed one at a time on eBay. People across the United States bid as much as $65 apiece for individual prints. When Levi Strauss closed its denim plant in late 1997, Baker instantly started a new career as a full-time seller on eBay.

For the first few months, everything clicked perfectly. Baker quickly became a clearinghouse, finding dealers who were eager to sell him boxes of Michael Jordan posters, Stevie Ray Vaughan pictures or, best of all, art prints. Then he resold them, one at a time, on eBay. Buyers paid double or triple -- or even more -- than what the items had cost Baker. Yet they felt that they were getting a good deal.

As Baker's sales volume soared, something jarring happened. What had started as a pleasant hobby became an exhausting collection of four or five jobs all rolled into one. Each day began with marketing and sales at 6 AM, as Baker started typing his latest "for sale" listings and then posting 100 or more of them on the Internet. At 10:30 AM, he collected the daily mail and turned into the finance department, sorting through dozens of small checks and making sure that he knew what each customer expected to get. There was no time for lunch: By the time the checks were processed, he needed to head into a large, insulated shed behind his house in Springdale, Arkansas and become the shipping department. There, he darted back and forth among vast rows of shelves, looking for everything from Monet or Van Gogh prints to sassy pictures of dogs playing poker and cats dressed up as sushi chefs. Each time that he found the right print, he rolled it up, slipped it into a narrow packing tube, and pasted on an address label. Just before 5 PM, he would head to the post office to mail the day's output.

Dinner was a blur, hastily gulped down with his wife and four children, before Baker headed back to his computer to become the customer-service department. Each evening, he dashed off dozens of emails, trying to straighten out lost shipments or to answer detailed queries about his wares. He unfailingly answered every stranger's email, partly out of politeness -- and partly out of a desire to offer the best customer service, and as a result, have one of the best feedback ratings on eBay.