220 Who Do You Think You Are?
What event or series of events led to your discovery?
As I look back over the types of businesses I’ve started and the things
that I’ve done, I realize there was a common theme. Regardless of how
remote it seemed, each one had to do with helping people discover
something in themselves, that inner sense that they can do something
more!
For example, my first business was in the gift industry. I started a
gift basket business. In that business I think I screwed everything up that
you could possibly screw up. After doing that for a while, I finally put
my foot down and decided I was going to figure out how to make it
work. The problem was, once I figured out how to make it work it wasn’t
fun anymore. So I sold the business and put together a book that taught
other people in the industry how to create this type of business and to
make it work. Most people in the industry didn’t know how to run a
business. They were doing it because they thought it was fun. Since they
didn’t know how to make their business work, they were losing a lot of
money and pretty much making their lives miserable. I saw a way that I
could help people understand how to make their business work, and that
was the second business I started.
From there is just kind of cascaded as we went through successive
businesses. At one point I taught college courses on business etiquette.
How silly is it that business etiquette can be considered empowering
people? I didn’t teach it from the angle of this is what you have to do,
this is what you don’t have to do. It was more like, these are the rules of
society and you want to know them so you can choose how to play the
game. It was all about letting people understand what impressions they
were giving, and how other people were perceiving them, so that they
could choose to do more of it or less of it and understand where they
were going.
Healthy Wealthy nWise is all about that. We’re starting a new
project now specifically geared toward businesses and small
entrepreneurs, to help empower the small entrepreneur to become
successful. And so it continues.
If you could give advice to those who are still searching for their
life’s purpose, what would it be?
In a course that I’ve written called The Science of Creating Your Dreams,
there’s an exercise that everybody has to do. It deals specifically with