Financial Freedom & Career Changes

“I don’t want to wake up,” I remember thinking to myself. I had no idea what went wrong. All I knew was that getting out of bed would only make things worse. But I had no choice, I had to go to work. I was doing an internship at Sun Microsystems at a time. I was getting paid quite well and looking forward to a “bright future.”

It fit perfectly into my plans. I was going to become a manager at a software company! And what’s better for that than a reference letter from a reputable company? Everything was going according to plan. There was only one little problem: I hated my life.

Just 15 years ago, if you had asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have told you that I would be a professional musician. This news would shock just about anyone that I know, today–but fifteen years ago, there was nothing in my life that indicated anything otherwise.

My entire life was music. I had gone to a performing arts high school where regular math, science and English classes were supplemented with courses in your major, and I was a music major. I played five instruments and participated in 5 different groups. Each year, I prepared solos or ensembles to take to district and state competitions.

Any successful person you meet will have a story of failure to tell you, and actually probably more than one. What separates the truly successful from those who skate by in life is not just what they learn from those failures well after they happen, but also how they handle those failures as they happen. These are delicate situations that can literally make or break a person’s life for a long time to come.

I’m about to tell you a story of how I faced a very difficult situation of failure which I could do very little about, and how I was able to turn that failure into an eventual long-term success.