Yes to Me

(Photo by Roger Lynn)

Editor’s note: This article is contributed by Ken King of Destiny Building. Thank you, Ken!

Have you ever had a feeling in life that you were exactly where you were supposed to be, doing exactly what you were supposed to be doing?

If you’ve ever been fortunate enough to experience it, you know that when it happens you feel a deep a sense of contentment in knowing that you are on the right path. All is as it should be, and the path that led you to that point was exactly the one you should have taken.

One afternoon last week I hopped on my bicycle and went for a ride to one of my favorite vistas, a beautiful lake overlooking downtown Orlando. Much of my writing is inspired in nature; composed of things that either “come” to me when I open myself up to ideas, or often as the result of meditating on a subject and then writing whatever begins to flow naturally.

While riding over towards the lake it began to dawn on me that in life our experiences are actually much more about the journeys themselves than about arriving at any particular destination. Somewhere along the way, I realized that I was so focused on getting where I wanted to go, I was ignoring wherever it was I happened to be. You see, one of the blessings I get to experience is that I live in an area with lots of older, unique homes, mature trees, brick streets, and in a community where people walk, ride, and jog along the main thoroughfare. Tables at outdoor cafes are common, and so when heading from point A to B there’s a lot to experience if you don’t get so focused on your destination that you block it all out.

Catching myself doing exactly that, I was reminded of the career paths that made up most of my existence. Too often I traded in the richness of the experience for benefits I believed would accrue when I arrived at my ultimate destination.

My focus on the future was killing my present.

My arrival at the lake provided a moment for reflection. As I looked back upon my career path, I realized that the shift away from enjoying the experience began in college, where after two years I changed my major from music to finance because I had no stomach for playing the role of a starving artist. Once out of college, I ignored jobs with challenge and high paying potential, looking instead for those that provided security and stability.

I found both in a career with the federal government. I had my own 6′x6′ cubicle, an excellent health plan, and three mid level supervisors sitting within 30 feet of me. I also found excruciating boredom and developed a distaste for mindless routine. I worked in an office full of people who kept retirement calendars pinned to their cubicle walls, counting down the years, months, and days until they would arrive at their ultimate destination (retirement). It was then that I began to realize that the chase for security left much to be desired.

My focus was chained to the future, and it was killing my present day by day. Yet so strong was my future orientation that I persevered in spite of my distaste for the environment. Eventually I grew to the point where I simply couldn’t stand it anymore.

My successes and failures as entrepreneur.

Six years later, after one more degree and the birth of my child, I made a radical shift, this time going into business for myself. I started a cleaning business that I ran for seven years and was financially successful with. Initially the challenge of building something from the ground up motivated me. Everything was my creation, from the logos to the advertising, hiring, firing, and networking with other local companies to bid on and complete large contract work.

I loved the creative portion, yet my outlook was still future based. And once the business became established I no longer enjoyed the day to day activities very much because to me the work lacked intrinsic value. I eventually sold the accounts and decided to take on an entirely new challenge.

My next business venture turned out to be my biggest failure, and yet also potentially my greatest blessing. I purchased an established retail operation and had ambitious plans of growing it even bigger. It too was void of intrinsic value, but the money looked good and I decided to go for it. It was a business that catered to homeowners and was almost entirely dependent upon the real estate market. I bought it at what turned out to be the worst possible time. Instead of making it big I ended up losing a lot of money and ultimately had to sell it at a loss. In short, I failed.

Yet I now had another chance, a choice to either do something that motivated me and was in line with my values, or to seek security in a steady income and put my focus on securing a successful retirement as my ultimate destination.

Embracing my journey to my life purpose.

Fast forward to that scene at the lake. There I sit, perusing my ambitions as a writer, life coach, and aspiring public speaker. I’d always had the urge to write, and I’ve been passionate about personal growth for many years. I’m a strong believer in being a lifelong learner, having taken courses in project management, public speaking, Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), life coaching and improvisational comedy simply because I loved learning and had a genuine interest in these things. I’d never taken any courses in writing, yet in the back of my mind I often imagined myself doing it someday.

Does my new career choice satisfy my desire for intrinsic value? Absolutely. To me there’s a deep sense of gratification in helping people overcome challenges and live out their life’s ambitions. To see that I’ve made a difference in someone’s life provides me with a sense of satisfaction unequaled by anything I’ve done before. So as I sat there overlooking downtown Orlando, pen and notepad in hand, suddenly it dawned on me.

I was right where I was supposed to be, doing right what I was supposed to be doing. All of the experiences of my life had come together to bring me to this point. They were all part of the journey. And quite often the experiences I labeled as “bad” proved to be the catalyst for change that ended up taking me where I really wanted to go.

I also learned that destinations in life are like checkpoints -once you reach them it’s time to move on to something else. It’s in the actual journey towards our destinations that we learn, grow, laugh, cry, rise, fall, and experience all the beauty and emotions of life itself. Lesson learned, I packed up my pen and pad and hopped back onto my bicycle. Riding home, I missed not a thing along the way.

Contributing writer’s greeting:
Thank you, Akemi, for allowing me to contribute to Yes to Me.
My blog, Destiny Building, is dedicated to helping people discover and live their true potential. Please check my blog if you enjoyed the above article. Thank you.
– Kenneth King

What is your life purpose? Click here to explore more.

(Photo by Leefotos)

Welcome to the Interview With Successful Entrepreneurs series! This is where we learn the startup secrets from those who actually took the leap. Before becoming entrepreneurs, they were professionals and managers, or college students, just like you. From there, they made the changes. . .

The foe is within us, not outside.

We often take the perspective of “me vs the rest of the world”. It’s an easy way of thinking. If you are employed as professional, you probably have indulged in the “I’m wasting my time and talent working for an idiot. I’m victimized.” thinking. Nobody understands you. Nobody appreciates you.

And some of you start your own businesses thinking you are now on top of the world — only to find that your customers are now your foe who don’t appreciate you! You wonder what went wrong . . .

Because you are yet to realize the challenge is within you, not outside. If your customers are unhappy, it’s because the business you have built has some glitches. Review your products and services, marketing strategies, the business structure, your people management skills, and so on, rather than making the customers wrong. You can start taking this responsible perspective even as employee.

Today’s guest is Tony Lawrence, who has been in the computer and network business for 25 years. He has a well-established website A.P.Lawrence.

1. Tell us a bit about your business and why you started it.

In 1981 I was working as a customer support rep for a Tandy Radio Shack Computer Center (yes, Radio Shack made computers back then). The base salary was low, but I also was paid a percentage of the store’s revenues, and that was pretty good. Unfortunately, IBM came out with their computer in 1981 and the IBM PC started killing our sales. By 1983, I was living on the base salary and hurting badly.

I had always wanted to start my own business (in fact had tried and failed twice prior to this) and it seemed like I had nothing to lose: I couldn’t do much worse than I was doing. So I just stood up one afternoon and walked out - I was a self employed consultant. In those days I did a lot of programming for small businesses. I was originally operating system agnostic, but I began to have more and more disdain for Microsoft and drifted toward Unix systems primarily. I’ve stayed there; picking up Linux in the 90’s and Mac OS X more recently.

My business has changed a lot over the years. I don’t do much programming now, though I do some back end Web scripts and small Perl projects. I sell mail servers for businesses with 10 to 750 employees, do some work with security routers and firewalls and am generally available for troubleshooting. I often function as the “IT guy” for companies too small to afford dedicated staff. I mostly do that for Unix and Linux systems; Microsoft Windows has improved enough that I won’t refuse to use it, but I still find Unix based systems to be more powerful and stable.

2. What were the biggest challenges when you were starting off as a new entrepreneur?

I thought my biggest challenge would be finding work, but in fact that wasn’t hard at all. At that time there were computer stores everywhere and the people who sold from them always needed help for themselves and their customers. I just drove around, stopped in, offered my services and left my card. Business came by the bucket full.

So much so that by 1985 I hired employees - four of them. I quickly found out that managing people is very different from providing technical services. I’m a lousy manager and most of the employees took advantage of that, goofing off while collecting generous paychecks from me. I was six figures in debt before I caught on and fixed the situation: I fired all but one and made him my partner.

Unfortunately, that didn’t work out either. We worked well together, and made money, but his wife wanted to move to the West Coast and soon enough they did. We tried to keep the partnership going, joking that we were “conveniently located at both ends of Interstate 90″, but it became a bookkeeping nightmare so we shut it down and went our separate ways.

The other challenge that is on-going is keeping up with new technology. That’s especially difficult as I get older - the brain that could once memorize fifteen digits at a glance isn’t quite so nimble any more. As the small independent computer stores folded up, finding new business also became more difficult.

3. And how did you work through these challenges?

I still struggle with learning - it’s a good part of every weeks work. It’s so important to keep your skills up in this constantly changing field. As I said above, the older I get the longer it takes me to learn new things, but I keep plugging away. It’s not that it is horribly difficult now; it’s that it used to be so easy..

An important part of finding work is paying attention to opportunity. If you listen carefully to what a customer is saying, if you take the time to engage with their employees and their customers, you may find income opportunities that your customer doesn’t even realize are there. One of my mottos in that regard is

“There are no problems, only income opportunities”

I am constantly alert for new opportunity.

The Internet brought new opportunities that I recognized very early on. I put up my first web page in the early 90’s and instituted http://aplawrence.com in 1997. Although originally this was strictly a technical site dealing with Unix and Linux issues, I now also write about Blogging and Self Employment there and 25% of my income comes from advertising revenues alone. Of course it also is a great source of consulting and sales opportunities: I have both consulting and mail server clients all over the United States.

I definitely would not have been so successful if it were not for the Internet.

4. What is the best part of being an entrepreneur for you?

For me, freedom is the driving force that keeps me self employed. I love being able to work when I choose. I also love being successful enough to turn down work I don’t want; for example refusing work from difficult or nasty people. I also enjoy helping other people start their own businesses - I’ve helped out many people with lunch-time chats and have even given them startup clients to get them rolling. Not all of them make it, but it feels good to help them try.

5. Any advice for people who dream to have their own business and yet find it hard to make the leap?

Consider that the most important thing in your life is happiness and that the happiest people are those who control their own destiny. I know it can be very scary to give up a “safe” job and set out into the uncertainty of self employment, but there are such tremendous rewards that it is worth the risk. Remember this also: if you are skilled and competent enough that someone else is willing to pay you money to work for them, you are obviously skilled and competent enough to work for yourself.

Another of my mottos is

“If I have to work for an idiot, I may as well work for myself”

I view employment as a form of slavery and hate seeing any one forced into it. Break free, be free.

My Takeaway
I love the resilient manner Tony navigated his way through all the changes. A market change can be a disaster or an opportunity depending on your perspective. Also look deep to dig out the hidden opportunities – I see that, if I can do this, I am ahead of all potential competition. And I think it’s great he likes to help out newer entrepreneurs!

Thanks to Steve for choosing this post as Editor’s Pick at Carnival of Career.

What’s stopping you from starting your business? Click here for the sidekick.

(Photo by CaptPiper)

Last year, I took a vacation day on my birthday – but not just to relax.

My birthday is coming up next week (Yep, I’m a brilliant Gemini. Two heads are better than one!) What do you do for your own birthday? Do you buy something you’ve wanted for a long time? Do you do something special?

I did something for my birthday last year, a seemingly small thing, which eventually led me to my current business. Back then, I was working the 8 – 5 corporate job, and I wanted to have my own business. I wasn’t sure where to start, but I wanted to start doing something. Maybe learning the general basic of small business is a good idea, I thought, and signed up for a seminar held by Small Business Administration. It was scheduled on Tuesday morning, so I had to use my vacation time to attend. Coincidentally, it was right on my birthday.

What do you really want for yourself going forward?

The idea of spending a vacation day sitting in a seminar may sound unromantic, but I’m glad I did. It set a tone for the year to come.

Not that I used the knowledge immediately. My business ideas have changed during the year. Initially, I was thinking of doing some real estate deals. I was learning how to make creative financing arrangements, and thought the timing was great to go ahead with the dooming market crash. Help those people who can’t pay their mortgage nor sell their house, put in good tenants, and I’d be a landlord! I still think this is a great idea and maybe I’ll do it – but I’ve found even more interesting thing to do as I progressed in the year.

I kept learning and working on some of the deals (potential deals, I should say. . .), and I ran out of vacation time. I figured that I needed at least one weekday to do this kind of real estate work. So I talked with my boss. I was very efficient and could fulfill all my responsibilities at the company in four days a week, and I was willing to do overtime on those four days if necessary, so may I free up one weekday? He told me no way. Everyone must work full-time or leave, no exceptions.

This made me think. This company relocated me from Ohio to Tennessee. If I weren’t working for this company, I didn’t have to be in Tennessee. What do I really want? Where do I want to be?

New possibilities emerge when we start moving to that direction.

I started meditating a lot last summer. I learned how to meditate more than 20 years ago, but I was only doing it on and off. Last summer, I decided to do it every day. And a strange thing happened. The idea of “Portland, Oregon” popped in my mind repeatedly in my meditation.

I moved myself to Oregon last October, still thinking I’d do real estate deals. But because I was new to the area, I had to learn the area first. While spending a lot of time driving up and down in this new city, and meditating and writing, I realized I’m very into personal development, especially in the spiritual area. So I started taking professional coach training courses. Now life coaching is my business, and real estate is put to back burner.

Looking back, I can hardly believe all the changes that have taken place in one year. And I think my birthday commitment to start a business of my own ignited these changes. It was my way to say “I’m in!”

Looking further back, I came to this country in 1995, two days before my birthday. I was to attend the summer courses at a college, and for the time being, that’s all I knew I was going to do. I didn’t know I’d get married, get a job, file divorce, change jobs, etc. at the time. I just put my first step forward in this new country.

You don’t need to know everything planned out to step forward.

If you want something more in your life, just start doing something for it. Then keep moving. It actually doesn’t matter if I’m using the tips I learned at the seminar for my business. I declared my intention to myself and to the Universe with that action, and that’s what matters.

For instance, if you are an aspiring entrepreneur, what is the one step you can take now that moves you closer to your dream business?

• Do you need to learn more about the trade?
  There are three ways of learning. Which ones are you doing now?
• Do yo need to research the market?
  The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich has great tips for this.
• Are you not sure where to start?
  May I suggest my e-workbook 7 Check Points For Aspiring Entrepreneurs? It is packed with questions that you need to think to get ready as an entrepreneur.

Give yourself the gift of commitment for your birthday. Oh, if your birthday is too far off, make another case to take that action. Every day can be your special birthday.

Thanks to Alex for including this post in Personal Development Carnival.

What’s stopping you from starting your business? Click here for the sidekick.