Welcome to the first ever guest blog at my365degrees.com! How excited am I that it’s from someone who does very cool work, is an awesome writer, and has a great story to share? His name is Dean Dwyer, and I met him in New York back in January. He’s from Toronto and is just as much of a fan of Seth as I am because he made the trip just for his book launch. Dean’s blog is The Quit List and the concept is “addition by subtraction”. Basically, quit doing the things that are holding you back and start doing the things that make you happy, successful, <fill in the blank>. His blog is insightful, funny, and you’ll probably find yourself thinking about what he wrote days later.

I wanted to include his story here because it fits in nicely with the main message in my book and, well, all the work I do! If you have a story like his or know someone who does, encourage him/her/you to send it to me to be featured here! I want more stories like this one!

Enjoy his story!

(And no, this isn’t just another way for me to get out of writing a blog…although it did cross my mind).

Oh, and yes, the series I started a few weeks ago will be back soon, promise.

The Courage to Quit

By Dean Dwyer

We all have moments of epiphany; a moment where we see the writing on the wall.  A moment where we realize the work we are doing is not in line with who we are.  A moment where we realize if we don’t change, we might just end up riding the out the remainder of our life wondering, “What if?”

While I would like to say that we all act on our epiphanies, our visions of a better more amazing future, the reality is most don’t.

The question to ask is, “Why don’t they?”
While I won’t claim to speak for all of humanity on this topic I do think I know why-FEAR.! Fear of the unknown, but more importantly, the fear of failure.

Why do I say this?  Because that is exactly what ran through my head as I lay in bed on December 14th, 2008.

I realized it had been 25 years since I had graduated from high school, and I was not doing anything that I had imagined for myself over that time period.  I had imagined great things, yet, when I looked at what my life had become, I saw nothing but disappointment and compromise.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way of course.  I had only been in this job for one and half years and the promise and potential that came with it seemed immense at the time. It was supposed to be my big break.

You see my background is teaching.  In fact, I taught for the better part of my adult life.  I had been in both public and private education for 17 years.  And those 17 years exacted a harsh toll.  It had brain-washed me into thinking that I was what I did.  I was a teacher.  At least that is what I kept telling myself.

And while I loved being a teacher, I struggled immensely being in a system that beat the creativity and intelligence out of kids.  I struggled having to teach kids “things” that had no relevance to the world they inhabited when they left the confines of my classroom.  I struggled placing a grade on work that I knew did not accurately reflect their true intelligence.

And I struggled listening to other teachers place labels of failure on these kids to cover their own deficiencies.  When is the last time any teacher sent a report card home that said, “I’m sorry!  I was unable to teach your child in a way that met her unique needs.  So I give myself a failing grade on my inability to reach your child.”

Of course that has never happened.  Why!  Because the system is designed to lay the blame solely at the foot of the student.

My internal struggle with whether to stay or to leave the profession went back and forth over the course of my 17 years.  Sometimes I felt it was enough to simply make a difference with the 30+ kids I had each year.  Other times I felt I was doing myself more of a disservice by not speaking out and being more an advocate for them and for change.

In the end, I realized I could no longer compromise my own needs.  I needed to be in a system where I had more control to affect change and make a difference.  My problem of course was that I felt it had to be in some sort of teaching capacity.

That all changed in July of 2007 when I happened to meet someone at Starbuck’s who owned a digital media company.  I had done a few writing projects for him pro bono, to help him out of a few jams, but the more I spoke with him and his vision of the company, the more I felt this was something I really wanted to be a part of.

So I did something very unusual.  I calculated how much I needed to make to cover my basic expenses and I made a job offer to him.

To my surprise, he accepted immediately and within a flash I was no longer a teacher.  I was now working with the internet, websites and content management systems.

This was exciting stuff, but it was also a little unsettling because I knew nothing about technology.  I barely had email mastered and now I was working with clients and helping them design websites and content that would (in theory) dramatically improve their business.

At the beginning, everything was great.  But as the honeymoon phase elapsed reality began to set in.  I began to see things I had turned my back on during my first year.  I began to see that the values we proudly promote on our website and in our meetings where not being lived behind the scene.

Clients were being talked about poorly, work promises were made that would never, in fact, be done (but the client would be paying for anyway) and blame was unfairly being levelled at some unsuspecting employee who was simply part of a much larger problem.

It was never the fault of the company and its directive or lack thereof.

I soon realized I had inadvertently put myself back into the same situation I was in when I was teaching.  I was working in a fundamentally flawed business that I could not change.

And as I lay there on December 14th I realized I was again at a cross roads.  Was I going to continue to sacrifice what I really wanted in life for the safety and security of working for someone else who took and inherited all the risks and all the rewards or was I finally going to stand up and be counted?

To complicate matters the country and the world was going through one of the worst economic times in its history.

But as I lay there, I realized I could not compromise who I was any longer.  I knew 25 years would again fly by and I could easily envision having the same thoughts and the same feelings of disappointment.

So I made a decision.  I decided to quit at the end of the month.  I crafted a complimentary letter of resignation indicating all the positive things I had acquired out of my experience, but stating that it was time for me to move onto to other things.

When January 1st came, I was officially unemployed with about 2 months of savings to rely on before I was out begging on the local street corner.

This initial period taught me my first really important lesson. Our minds are trained to focus on all that can go wrong.  And while it is always important to have a plan in case the worst case scenario should happen, it is easy for that worst case scenario to dominate our thoughts and ultimately our actions.

So I chose to eliminate three things.  I stopped reading the newspapers (except for the sports section because t hat always has stories of great achievement).  I stopped watching the news.  News casts in general are designed to focus on all that is wrong with the world.  For some reason, humans have a morbid appetite for death and destruction, but I didn’t need to be one of them any longer. Third, I decided to carefully control who I shared my story with.

That last one was the most challenging because what we do constitutes most of what we talk about with people, especially those we first meet.  We are identified and continue to identify ourselves by our work.  I had no work to speak of and as a result I discovered that many people just didn’t get what I was doing nor did they understand why I would be doing it considering the economic climate.

I found I was spending an inordinate amount of my time justifying my rationale for my actions.  What rankled people most was the fact I had no answers for them.  People need to see a clear destination in a story and mine had none.

I had no idea where I was going, how I was going to earn my living nor did I have any prospects on the horizon.

Quite frankly, people thought I was nuts.

I don’t blame them for that in fact, but what I discovered is that my journey evoked answers from people that brought out all that they were afraid of.  There advice was not really advice for me, but rather advice for themselves.

I realized quickly that if I was going to discover my calling I had to stop indulging in these conversations because I knew my subconscious would feed on this and hijack my dream.

So I decided instead that I would focus on all the reasons why I could do this.

My next task was to start writing a blog.  I have always enjoyed writing even though English was always my worst subject in school.  It seemed that what I thought on a particular book or about a particular subject was always wrong.

I internalized it at the time, thinking I was to blame, but I now realize that my “failure” in English had more to do with the fact I failed at being able to articulate what my teacher thought.  In essence they should have been asking me, “What do I (the teacher) think the character meant when she said (blank)?”

With that, he Dwyer Chronicles was born.  I did this for about a month, but quickly realized this wasn’t the best use of my time as it brought in zero income.  So in month 2 I retired the blog to focus more on income generating opportunities.

One of the other things I did as soon when I launched into my new journey of self-discovery was  to meet up with anyone I knew who was doing something interesting.  I had numerous conversations with people who were doing some amazing things they were really passionate about.

This led me to a meeting with someone who I had befriended some years before who was a real estate agent.  We had stayed in touch over the years and he had since moved from being a realtor to being a business owner.  He had found a niche where people with bad credit were not being serviced.  They were looking to purchase a home, but because of their bad credit were unable to make their dream of home ownership a reality.

His company bridged that gap by creating a rent to own company.  People with bad credit could now get the home they wanted and in the process his company would help them repair their credit so that at the end of the lease term they would be in a position to qualify for a traditional mortgage.

Our meeting was interesting.  They always were.  But this one was different because after I had left, it dawned on me that I could fill some of the challenges his company was facing.

The job I had just left had also provided me with an array of skills in not only website construction, but also email marketing.  They were sorely lacking in both these areas and I saw a fit.

So for the second time in less than two years, I put together a proposal.  But there were stark differences in my second proposal.

You see, I had made a list of what I was looking for in the work I was going to be doing.

* I wanted to be self-employed
* I wanted to work with (not for) value driven people
* I wanted to dictate where (no geographical restrictions) and when I worked
* I wanted the ability to create change
* I wanted to be involved in work that made a difference

My proposal was to act as an independent consultant.  I laid out what I needed to create the work I wanted to create on the terms I wanted to create it and indicated the salary I would need to make this work for me

Once again my proposal was accepted immediately.  I know had income to cover my living expenses.

In the first week of November 2009, I launched a new blog called Quitbit.   It is about the power of quitting.  I am looking to create a movement to get people to quit stuff that is holding them back from being who they truly want to be. It is addition by subtraction.

Because in the end we have all the tools we need to succeed.

To finding your ideas worth quitting,

Dean

www.thequitlist.com

One Response to “I Had To Share This Story With You”