Good Thursday morning to you. I hope you are having a great week and that the points of this week are helping you to move forward towards an ideal life, towards a dream life that you could only imagine. I know I spent so many years chasing random goals, always looking for my happy place. Many of those years were spent chasing from one dream to another. At the first sign of trouble or first hardship I would give up and chase what seemed to be the next easy ticket to get to my goal.
Today as I’m writing this post, I’m sitting in a Starbucks that had so many meaningful meetings for me over the years. This Starbucks is where my last car wash business was born. It was here that I met a gentleman who was another great influence in my life at a time when I felt I had no direction. His name is Bob, a builder here in the Dallas area. Others I have met here were people who were leaders in the business community. Many times as I was sitting here talking to some of these men the subject came up of what they thought was best for my life and how I could become rich doing it. Or how being in a certain group of people would boost my success (to them success meant money). Today I hardly ever see any of those men anymore; I have heard stories that one went to jail for a government scam, one moved to the country to start a farm, one changed from selling cars to leasing work trucks.
The bottom line for me is most of the advice I received here is from those who were chasing money, always looking for a short-cut to getting rich. There was never any talk from them about building a happy life of success. Never was there talk that getting to the top floor of success involved a staircase that took you one step at a time. Even in our world of internet billionaires, if you ask them, they will tell you there was a step-by-step process that took them from nothing to success.
The clients I start with are almost all in the same shoes: working what they feel is a dead-end job with nothing, wanting to start over. The first step to getting out of where you are (and most of them hate where they are) is to become successful at whatever you’re currently doing and get promoted out of it. You see, if you go from dead-end job to dead-end job, always looking for the golden ticket, it will never happen. What employers are looking for is someone who shows success. They want someone who works hard at what they do, who shines at it so well that others want to hire them before someone else does.
So where are you now? Have you defined a path of success where you are? When you become successful at what you do, you will see yourself happier in your life situation. One definition of success is to shine so well that your employer will do anything to keep you in the company. Those are the people who get offered other jobs without searching for them because they develop a reputation of success. This is a step that you repeat with each new promotion because it works. You will see yourself being moved up a staircase, or a ladder of success, step by step. To others it will seem as if you are taking two and three steps at a time or maybe even skipping steps, getting “lucky.” But you will know the truth, that it takes one step at a time.
Maybe you want to become a successful entrepreneur but you need the regular paycheck from the employer to pay the bills while you get there. So what does someone in those shoes do to become successful? Well I learned in the early ‘90s from a man who told me to find another avenue to work in outside of my 9-to-5 job. If you have a family, maybe you get your spouse and family in on the process. Then, step by step, you start small and always reinvest your money to make your side business grow. But still you work and give your employer the value of nine hours worth of work for eight hours of pay. It is those who work hard for their day jobs, then spend the nights building another company who have more opportunity when they need overtime.
Years ago it was called moonlighting; employers were stating in employment contracts that those who worked for the company could not do something on the side. Well if you work and give them such a great value when you are there, soon you will find they won’t care what else you are doing because your value to the company is so great they want to keep you happy. You can read back through history and find those who have developed this value to the company. Often they get great offers and become part owners in the companies they were working at, because the company offered to buy out the very dream that was started in their garage at home.
I can tell you from family history, my mom’s younger brother started out at a company as a janitor. He is now Vice President of a division. He never went to school beyond high school, never attended a college class yet has gone to levels his father could only dream of when he was a kid. This is my personal goal in life: to take the knowledge I have and my drive to work hard and go farther than my father ever could have imagined I would go. The greatest gift I could do for him is to make a great success of my life. To do that I must work step by step, just like he did.
I’m Tim Gillette, the Rocker Life Coach. It’s time to live the life you always dreamed of, to love what you do and those you share your life with. Start now by becoming the RockStar in your world.
