Launchout Talk 6-21-2014

Today is number 12,097 of my life.

Psalms 90:12 says So teach us to number our days, That we may present to You a heart of wisdom.

My talk today is a thumbnail of a bigger picture I have been working on for a while that I call The Other 72, and there are two central themes that comprise that bigger picture:

First, The years you have on earth are only worth the sum of the months, weeks, days, and hours contained in them, and every one of has the responsibility to make our days count.  The number 72 refers to the hours left in a week after working 40 hours and sleeping 8 hours a night. Yes, I am aware those numbers are probably more fantasy than reality for most of us, but it is a starting point. 72 hours or whatever your number equals is a huge amount of time to divide and use wisely.

Secondly, wholeness in life is not based solely on success in any one area, rather all the parts of your life contribute to wholeness/lack.

In my opinion no one illustrates the former any better than Robert D. Smith’s 20,000 Days and Counting. Everyone needs to read that book. Or even better, listen to Robert read the book. The passion in his voice is energizing and will get you excited about using your hours well.

As for the latter, with a little help from Dave Ramsey and Dan Miller I found Zig Ziglar’s Wheel of Life which illustrates the idea with a wheel made of seven spokes: Spiritual, Physical, Intellectual, Career, Financial, Social, and Family.

I am exploring these themes in detail in an ebook I had hoped to have ready by this weekend, and I am acutely aware of the irony that a book about the intersection of time management and life goals missed a deadline. With those impeccable credentials in place, I want to share how I got started on this path. Here are 5 lessons I learned from losing my dream job.

Lesson number 1: When things go bad, don't go with them. Separate fact from falling skies.

On August 21st, 2013 things went bad. My boss called me into her office and told me “We no longer have the budget to support your position. I am sorry, but we have to let you go.” Those words hit me like a punch in the gut, because this was my dream job.

I had discovered a love for all things architectural when I was 11 or 12. The idea of drawing a plan to build a building captivated me from the first time I learned there was such a thing. I eventually went back to school and graduated at the top of my class with a degree in Architectural Design with a concentration in Green Building/Energy Efficient Design. I joined all the associations I could find and I was ready to take the design world by storm. In June of 2012 I landed a job at a brand new Architecture firm. Life was good, I was doing work that fulfilled me and was making more money than I ever had before. I had a real title, added a few sets of initials to my letterhead and email signature, soon was working in a brand new office that I helped design. I had arrived. I was finally SOMEBODY. I had my dream job, then suddenly, I didn’t.

The drive home was only 40 minutes, but it felt like hours. I was mad, betrayed, and above all scared. My mind was screaming that I had failed as a man and as a provider. You are going to lose everything! You will have to go crawling back to the retail world and hope and pray they will take you back! That brand of thinking is crippling, and I quickly learned that I would have to push back against it often.

Jon Acuff had taught us in START that nothing conquers fear better than truth. Thankfully, I had learned years ago to plan from the worst-case scenario backwards. That means acknowledge the real worst-case scenarios and decide what you will do if it actually happens. The large majority of what your brain is screaming at you will fail this litmus test. What you are left with is the unvarnished truth of where you are and what you need to do. If you can survive that and start again you have the genesis of a plan, and you can tell Chicken Little to chill out.

In a gratuitous stroke of timing was this little shindig called the START Conference. I was quite hesitant to spend any of the money I had left on a road trip and a conference, but my best friend Jeremy Shelton talked me into it and I can honestly say the books I listened to on the drive there and back and the conference itself changed my life.

I actually got to meet a few of y'all at the conference. I'm sure I came off as calm, composed, and incredibly handsome, but only one of those was true. What was true was that I was at the end of my rope vocationally, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. I'm not sure what I was hoping to find at the conference, but I was determined to have some sort of plan in place when I got home.

Lesson number 2. Make a plan. If you can own the problem, you can own the solution.

Somewhere between Nashville and Mobile I decided that as soon as I got back on my feet, I would never work for anyone else again. My logic was that I would never fire me. Never lay me off or cut my pay.

Drawing from everything I had learned, and pages of notes I had taken, I took a day to myself and started forming what I now call the Other 72. I made a list of everything I could do that made me feel alive and could possibly be monetized. That broke out into 3 categories: Architectural Design, Assembly, and Music. I then took each of those and broke them out into two lists, and because I have an insatiable need to name and polio categorize everything I a called the lists What I Know and Room tow Grow. Brilliantly inspiring, I know. Feel free to use that.

That gave me an honest list of goals and specific tasks to work on that I named "Adjusting". It’s a great exercise and I plan on doing it annually from here on out. In doing that, I realized that nothing prevented me from pursuing all three of my categories at the same time. I quite enjoy the assembly business, and I had dreamed of playing in a band for a living since I was 8 years old. For the first time in my adult life that was not only possible, assuming that there was some level of income attached, but very practical.

At the end of that day I had moved through the sky falling down to an actual plan to put things back together, but there was still the small matter of surviving during that process. I had to find some kind of income immediately. Something flexible, easy to get into. Enter Poppa Johns Pizza. Dave Ramsey always said delivering pizza is a great way to pay off debt, turns out it will also keep the rent paid when everything else goes south. Plus, free pizza!

Working at Poppa Johns gifted me with Lesson number 3: Circumstances and bank account don't determine your worth to God.

While delivering pizza will keep you from starving, it is fatal to the ego. Even though I know it is only for a season, I will never forget the feeling of shame the first time I confessed to someone about my new occupation. That uniform became a reminder that I apparently wasn’t enough. Not good enough, not smart enough, not worth enough. I had no problem working through that on an intellectual level, the emotional level was a bit tougher. One night in particular while washing dishes at Poppa Johns I was soaking wet, tired, and feeling sorry for myself. I asked God out loud, “What am I doing here? With my talents and abilities, the education I am paying dearly for, WHY AM I HERE?”

It was not an audible voice, but a word spoken into my spirit replied, “To be the very best delivery driver at Poppa Johns.” Folks, that was NOT what I was hoping for, but it was a moment of startling clarity: God was no more impressed with my previous success than He was dismayed with my current struggle. The truth is, I had made what I did who I was. I was somebody! I was important! and I had carried the same attitude in the opposite direction when it all fell apart. I realized that this was something God had been trying to teach me. I’m not saying that He wanted to wreck my life just to uproot some things, but I firmly believe He was and still is using this to teach me. And in the big picture, 20 years from now, this will be a blip. There will be other success and other failures, and I’m going to learn from all of them.

Lesson number 4. Networking and Community are vital, you have to start somewhere.

I had made the decision to start my own Architectural Design Company. My Room to Grow list told me I needed a portfolio, website, and contacts in the related fields. Most important was a portfolio. Everything I had worked on for over a year belonged to someone else and I couldn't use any of it. Getting something drawn was vital. I had crossed paths with Lisa at the START conference meet up and I immediately caught her passion for Barnabas House and wanted to be a part of the process. She gets a floor plan and a model, I get a sweet project to add to my portfolio. Winning! Barnabas House is actually the project I show when I’m networking with other design professionals, and we have both benefited greatly from it. That’s one of my notes from Startcon Be the support you wish you had: support others.

As for the website, I started with a GoDaddy template, made a really ugly web page and shamelessly crowd sourced the Dreamers and Builders until I got something decent. As soon as it is practical to spend some money on a professionally built website, I will look no further than Dreamers and Builders.

I started networking with design professionals in the next county. I found as many contacts as I could in the design field-structural, civil, custom home builders and even other architectural designers and I cold called every one of them. I explained who I was and what I was trying to do and asked if I could sit down with them over coffee and talk about the business.

Out of the first round of cold calls, I was blessed to meet the man who is now my mentor. Ray invited me to his home and spent 2 hours talking through some of his experiences and lessons learned as I took pages of notes. In reaching out to him I had nothing to lose if he said no and plenty to gain if he said yes. This guy is a talented and very successful designer and he was willing to coach and mentor someone moving in to his profession, essentially a competitor. That's another nugget from Startcon, find a mentor you want to become.

Lesson number 5. Refine the dream.

In the book, I outline in a lot more detail moving from Survival to Adjusting to Success, and in all honesty I have struggled with defining my idea of what success looks like. I wrestled my definition down to this: Success is making a living doing what I love, on my own terms, while constantly refining and improving my abilities to do that work.

I have learned that success or failure is majorly influenced by perspective and not nearly as black and white as I would prefer. If you told 14 year old me that I was making a living drawing houses, doing professional assembly work, and touring the nation playing music, he would be ecstatic, and that is exactly what I am doing, none of which was possible while I was working my dream job, but I still haven’t replaced my former income. So was losing that job a blessing or a curse? That depends on me. I am confident that as long as I remain committed to continual refinement and improvement, I will eventually be successful far beyond my dream job.

So here is what I hope to leave you with: Separate the drops of truth from the ocean of lies that fear presents you.  Don’t let a crappy now equal a crappy later. Accept the truth of where you are and dream of where you want to be. Figure out what you need to do and learn to get from here to there. Embrace community and support others along the way. Define and refine what success looks like to you. And repeat as necessary.