He says that he saw the world was changing and that he saw a brighter future in information and not in manufacturing. So he went through college, graduated with a good education, and began climbing the corporate banking ladder. This was absolutely the right move for him to make at the time. He saw the world was changing and he chose to position himself for the new opportunities that were becoming available. This worked out perfectly for him. He is now a Branch President and is in a position to retire within a few years.

How ironic that he would be the same person who I had to turn my notice into just a few months ago. The story is identical. I did what was expected of me. I got into the corporate world because that was a good path for past generations. Luckily, I was able to see that once again the world is changing. There is tremendous opportunity available at your finger tips. I have chosen to build an online business and leave the corporate rat race to someone else. 

Don’t take the norm for granted. If you aren’t being innovative and looking for ideas, you are just standing still. The world is changing and opportunity is everywhere. Don’t be too afraid to make your dreams come true.

“Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better”~Ralph Waldo

“We can’t become what we need to be by remaining what we are.”~Oprah Winfrey

One year ago as 2009 was about to begin, I made a commitment to myself that this year was going to be different. I had been unhappy with my career choice for about 3 years and was not living the life I had dreamed of. Every morning I would wake up and tell myself, “This year is going to be different.” I swore to myself that I was not going to let another year pass and stay with my unhappiness.

Like most people, after about a month or so, I stopped saying to myself every day that it was going to be different, but I never stopped believing it. As I changed the calendar to June, I said to myself, “Damn, the year is half over and it hasn’t been much different.”

Determined to not let myself down I put it in overdrive and put my plan into place. It was a lot of work. It took a lot of guts, determination, and a well designed plan but I deffinately made sure that 2009 was different.

I left my corporate job, increased profitability of my online business, and have allowed myself to go hiking, spend more time with my kids, and live each day exactly like I want to.

I could have never accomplished all of this without knowing and focusing on my true desire. I recommend you make the most of this time of change and lay out a plan to reach your true goals. You will never regret following your bliss.

Cheers to a wonderful 2010!

It is pretty easy to fill each day with emails, phone calls, and some wasted time on your favorite social media site. Then fill your evening with TV and movies. With long work days and distractions at home it is very easy to keep thinking that someday you’ll make that change.

The days, weeks, and years pass by one by one and slowly life is passing you by while you work hard for someone else. You may say to yourself that someday things will change. The reality is that things will never change unless you make them.

“They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself”~Andy Warhol

If you really would like to be financially independent, happy with your work, and in control of your time; you need to make the decision to take control of your life. If you set goals, work towards them, and do something you are passionate about, you will finally reach your true happiness.

What is holding you back? Is your corporate job really that secure? Is the promotion you are working for really going to make you happy? Will that tiny raise you expect next year really make any difference?

Don’t fool yourself. Continuing to work in that same job is not going to get you to your goals. You have the ability to do great things but your boss will never know it. Your boss doesn’t care. Their ultimate goal is different than yours.

You can’t sit back and wait for change. You have to make it happen. There is no sense in waiting for the right time. There is never a better time to make a change than right now.

One day my Branch President called me into her office.  She was a very nice but sometimes a stern woman.  She reminded me of some teacher I had had back in junior high or high school.  I had a lot of respect for her and hoped to learn from her so that I could be a Branch President some day.  We talked for a few minutes about how we were trying to become part of the community and that we needed to become more active.  I agreed and was eager to succeed in this new role.

This branch was brand new in a small community located near Durango, CO. The small community was an old ranching community whose big annual event involved running sheep down main street. It was a community full of older people and it was pretty close knit but I was determined to become a success. 

My boss said, “The only service organization in town is the Lions Club, and I’d like to see you attend one of their meetings and maybe join their club”.

I didn’t really now much about the Lions Club but I was up for anything so I said, “No problem when do they meet”.

The next morning she poked her head into my office and said, “I got a call back from the president of the Lions Club.  He said you could come to their meeting on Thursday night.” 

I replied, “No problem”.

Then she started to laugh and said, “He asked what you looked like so he could greet you and I started to say that you were young and he laughed and said ‘he would be the other young guy there’”.

I didn’t understand why she was laughing until I got to the meeting.  Here I was a 28 year old punk who was pretty free spirited and enjoyed being young at heart.  I walked up to the old grayish white building that had cracks in the plaster and nothing but weeds growing in the flower beds.  I slowly walked up the wheel chair ramp and through the door into a room that reminded me of some time long ago. 

The hall was an old building with scratched and dusty wood floors.  The wood paneled walls were covered by felt banners symbolizing some achievement of yesteryear and black and white pictures of past presidents.  Even the most recent years looked like someone had played a practical joke and photo shopped 70’s clothing and cop mustaches on these poor people.  I made my way over to the kitchen where a smiling lady my grandmother’s age gladly dished up some slop that looked like something you would pick up at a truck stop.

I turned and scanned the crowd trying to figure out where I was going to sit.  It looked like I had wandered into the ‘Sunny Acres Retirement Home’.  Everyone in the room was 60 years old or older.  I smiled at a group of Blue Haired beauties and stumbled over an old man’s cane that was lying beside him on the ground.  I settled into a spot.  Introduced myself then listened to a conversation about which members wouldn’t be here tonight because they were in or out of the hospital.

Don’t get me wrong.  The Lions Club does a lot of great things for the community and I do believe it is important to be involved in your community, but a 28 year old with new ideas and beliefs has no business in a small town Lions Club.

After joining the club I tried my best to enjoy it and have fun.  I also showed up early to set up tables and stayed late to help out.  I didn’t want to see any of these old people hurt themselves.  Within a few weeks of joining I was invited to my first funeral in years.  It was clear that I had given up my desire to be young and free and traded it in for a membership at the old folk’s home. 

Is this who I wanted to be?  Is this the future I wanted?  Definitely not, but for some reason I continued with it in the short term thinking that it would help my career.  It was just one more rung in the ladder and for some reason, I was climbing.  The Lion’s Club was just the first of many events that should have been wake up calls.

A couple of months ago when I was still going through the motions of my corporate job, I had the chance to meet someone in my community, Susan, that had lost almost 200 pounds and over 70 inches from her waist line. I was at a business meeting dressed in my banker costume and not real excited to be headed back to the office after this meeting. The owner of the local Anytime Fitness brought in Susan to share her amazing success story.

I started really thinking about how people who are extremely overweight are probably unhappy with the way they feel and look for a long time but it is so hard to make the decision to change their lives. Making that life changing decision takes commitment, dedication, and even a great deal of stress. It is so much easier to just keep doing the same thing every day even though the outcome is making you unhappy.

Susan talked about how she had just come to a fork in the road where she couldn’t take it anymore. She had to take action. She had to take life into her own hands and make a major change.

I sat there impressed by her amazing dedication and weight loss achievement. Then, I realized that I was in a similar situation. I was unhappy with what my past decisions had led to but I was afraid to make a major life changing decision.

Sometimes you find inspiration in the strangest places. I was inspired to take charge of my life. Whether your unhappiness is weight, a bad job, a career in the wrong industry, or anything else; take control and make changes to live the life you want.

I enjoyed reading Who Moved My Cheese?, it is a really easy read and not very long. I think I finished it in one evening. But the symbolism in the story struck a chord with my current situation and I really got a chuckle out of how ridiculous it was that I was doing the same thing every day somehow expecting things to be different.

The book is basically about two guys who live in a maze and live off of eating cheese. They discover a large source of cheese and go to it every day. They enjoy the safety of knowing where the cheese is and they don’t have to take chances in the maze looking for other sources of cheese. Over time the cheese becomes moldy and really doesn’t taste as good as it did in the beginning but they continue to go to it everyday. One day the cheese is gone. Afraid to venture into the unknown they complain and fight between each other about where the cheese is. Day after day they continue with the routine of going to the same spot even though the cheese is not there. After some time one of the guys gets up the nerve to go out into the maze searching for more cheese. His friend refuses to go and even tries to talk him out of it telling him how hard it will be. The one who ventures off into the maze discovers that there is a lot of cheese elsewhere and venturing into the maze isn’t as scary or difficult as he thought. Actually he enjoys exploring in the maze and finding new and better sources of cheese.

The guy who ventured off in search of his own cheese stopped and wrote on the walls of the maze along the way. Three notable quotes are “If You Do Not Change, You Can Become Extinct”, “When you move beyond your fear, you feel free”, and “What Would You Do If You Weren’t Afraid?”.

How does your cheese taste? Is it stale or are you still enjoying it like when you first discovered it? What would you do if one day your cheese was gone? Would you complain and blame others or go out searching for your own new and better cheese?

I think this is a powerful story about change, how you foresee change, how you adapt to it, and how you can take life in your own hands. I highly recommend it for a fun short yet inspirational read.

The beauty of a free market system is that anyone can open their own business. They may succeed or they may fail but there is reward for the risk. Just like in Las Vegas, when you take a larger risk you receive a larger reward. That is the whole reason that entrepreneurs take the risk, because they anticipate a huge reward.

If we did not have businesses taking risk each day we would have no innovation. It is the innovation of businesses that has given us all of the technological advances that we enjoy each day. If nobody was willing to take risk then we would have no new products, no new businesses, and no advances in current business practices.

It seems to me that small business is the backbone of our economy. Small business creates jobs and creates innovation. If you consider all of the mass layoffs by major corporation, you could say that small businesses have created 100% of all job growth in the last two years. Small business is putting people to work and deserves more respect for what it has done to keep the economy rolling.

Now lets talk about those too big to fail. The companies that were declared too big to fail were huge banks and huge auto manufacturers. The banks caused the problem to begin with by taking on unnecessary risk in the form of bad loans. These banks are also guilty of making credit too easy which let some small businesses bite off more than they could chew which ultimately led to their failure. The auto manufacturers are in trouble because they haven’t been making a product that people want to buy. Foreign auto makers are making better quality cars with better gas mileage. The American auto makers would not have had a problem if they had been manufacturing a product that people wanted to buy.

If you declare a company “Too Big to Fail” then there is no reason for them to consider risks and make calculated decisions. The banks can continue making bad loans and over paying executives and the suto makers can make clunkers. They have nothing to lose.

So what does that say to you and me. We need to calculate the risk involved before we get into business and make wise business decisions (until we grow large enough where we can just do whatever we want).

I don’t know about you, but I have decided to be a part of the solution not the problem. Calculating risk and growing a small business is the most rewarding thing you will ever do.

Our parents and grandparents worked one job for 40 years all for one company. Why are we so quick to change careers? Well, the working world has changed drastically over the years and seems to be changing at a faster and faster pace. Here are some of the reason for people change careers:

• Companies buy, sell, and merge all the time leading to many changes in their need for employees
• The break-neck speed at which technology has improved has left many careers and industries in the dust
• Entrepreneurial opportunities are everywhere
• The company doesn’t care about you so you have no loyalty to them and will work for a competitor for a reason as little as their coffee tastes better
• Your grandfather’s pension plan no longer exists
• There is no gold watch

The mass downsizing of corporations in the 1990’s and again in recent years shows that they will drop you in a heartbeat to save the CEO’s bonus. Why would you pour your heart and soul (or at least the best part of the day) working for a company that could drop you next week to save a buck. If there is anything that we learned in the recent economic downturn, it is that there is no job security.

The only job security is you getting up every morning and working for yourself. You create your own job by doing something you are passionate about and you will find a way to keep money in your pocket. I would rather be in control and be responsible for my well being than to depend on a job that may not be there tomorrow.

So why is it that most people pick their college major and therefore their future career at a time when they can’t even make a good decision about a hairstyle or kind of music to listen to. Can you image at age 18 choosing a genre of music that you had to listen to the rest of your life. Then why would you choose what you would do with the majority of your waking hours at that age.

No wonder so many people switch majors during school and even more never use their degree. The system that we send our kids through just doesn’t work. Instead of allowing our children to graduate from high school and take some time figuring out who they are and what they want to do, our system nearly forces kids directly into college out of high school.

Why isn’t it the norm to spend a year or two figuring out who you are? What could possibly go wrong if you allow someone to experience life before they go into college. Many students are not ready for college at 18 and end of dropping or flunking out. If they waited and realized the value of an education they would never flunk out.

Parents, Teachers, and members of society frown upon young adults who take time to find themselves. What is the big hurry? I think that if we all thought about what we wanted to do and what gifts we had to give to society we would all be better off.

Maybe the older generations are just worried about getting the kids to work so they can start paying into the social security system.

I think we all need to take a look at who we are and what we enjoy. Going with the flow can be dangerous and could be a huge waste of time and money. I say question the norm and make your own decisions.

How do you know if you should continue climbing the ladder in your current industry?

• Do you enjoy the work you do on a day to day basis?
• Are you passionate about the work you do?
• Does the work you are striving to do provide the emotional and financial needs of you and your family?
• Can you see yourself doing this work in 15 or 20 years?

I recently left the banking industry because I did not enjoy the work I did, was not passionate about it, and could not see myself doing it for 15 more years. For me the big one was the long term committment. From day one I couldn’t believe I was a banker. I had a perception of what bankers are like and I did not fit that mold.

I played the game to get by and started climbing that ladder. I reached Vice President and looked around at the other Vice Presidents and higher. They weren’t like me. Don’t get me wrong, these men and women are very intelligent and good at what they do, but they weren’t who I wanted to be. I had no one to look up too because I couldn’t stand the thought that I was going to be like them.

Look around your workplace and see who you would like to be. I’m not talking specifics. Of course you would be different because you are you, but in general that person holds their position because they fit what the company was looking for. Can you or would you like to fit that mold?