First Post - Hello and Let's Get This Started

Welcome to Open Up The Doors, my first foray into the world of blogging. Not sure if anyone is going to read this, and not sure I really care, but I felt it was a good way to express some ideas that are important to me. My primary goal in maintaining this is to hold myself accountable to a series of goals and challenges that I have laid out for myself. If anyone else can benefit from the lessons I learn here, terrific. Happy to help others succeed. Obviously just having a blog is not a magic formula for accountability, but my hope is that by being forced to report my results – both good and bad – a spark will be lit that will allow me to accept and these challenges and thrive.

As some of these goals relate to work, I’m going to keep my identity confidential for now. Perhaps I’ll reveal it later at some point, but at his stage I just want to focus on what I need to do without having anyone from work keeping tabs on me. The quick background on me is that I’m 40, am married to my soul mate, have two wonderful elementary school aged kids, live in the Northeastern part of the USA, and work in B2B sales for a publicly traded company, selling services to the IT departments of major US corporations.

I have established three goals for myself this year:

1. Start a business
2. Get my weight below 200 pounds
3. Win the highest possible honor in my sales organization, an award called APEX

Why these goals? Well, the weight one is fairly straightforward. I’m 6 feet tall and play a lot of sports, but have somehow ballooned to 226 pounds. The lowest I’ve ever been was 182 when I lived abroad and ate a very healthy Asian diet,  but my general weight ought to be in the 200-205 range. I’ve let myself slip through bad eating habits and a lack of consistent exercise, so the time is now to get things right again. I also suffer from mild depression. It’s not overly serious – as in, I’ve never been suicidal or anything - but it does tend to get worse when I don’t exercise or sleep enough. So losing weight will not only make me feel better physically, but mentally as well, which will positively impact my other two goals.

As for the APEX award, to be frank, this is a real stretch. In business and life I tend to be very pragmatic and logical. In terms of sales, I generally can look at my territory and give a pretty good estimate of how the year will go. I’m not one for making audacious goals because, frankly, those usually are based more in hope than logic. That said, I’ve never been a particularly successful salesperson. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll usually make plan or come close to it, but overachievement is sadly not my forte. There are those in my company – often those whom I have little respect for – who talk about establishing these sorts of magical goals. Usually I don’t pay much attention to them. I mean, they’re not out in the field and frankly, I am skeptical of them since ultimately they benefit from the work I’m doing so naturally they are going to try to spur me to do more. Yes, I’m a cynic. However, I was recently talking to a peer of mine whom I do respect quite a bit. He has been successful for 20+ years and has the same healthy skepticism for management types that I do. One of his main pieces of advice that I really took to heart was that you need to raise your expectation level. When you expect more for yourself, you naturally do all the things you need to do to hit those expectations. You’re not doing it for someone else, heck – you’re not even doing it to hit some material goal (i.e., new kitchen, new boat, etc), rather, you are just raising the bar for what should be a minimum expectation. By setting the bar high and really trying to get there, even if you fail, your landing point will end up being so much higher than your previous aspirations were. So do I think I’ll make APEX? Probably not. It’s a huge stretch, one achieved by less than 2% of the salesforce worldwide, but even if I come up 50% shy of this goal, I’ll still have the best year I’ve ever had, so I’m going to go for it and see what happens.

The last goal has to do with long term and short term financial needs and goals. In the near term, I’m looking for some extra money. It doesn’t need to be a ton – even an extra $1k or $2k per month would be a huge help. I used to get that playing poker online and that was a huge benefit, but with online poker dead for now, I am looking to figure out some sort of business that will throw off a little spending money each month while serving as a foundation for a longer term option. You see, ultimately I have no desire to work in corporate America – or better said, for corporate America. I would rather build my own business that offers me the a chance at a big payoff rather than toil away for a pretty good wage. Let me be clear here – I am not exactly living a bad life. While I’m not a 1%’er, I’m am in the top 5%, so I definitely make decent money. However, I realize that the things I want to do in life and the way I want to live require me to climb that chain and get closer to the top 1%. I could go the corporate route, but that will ultimately make me want to hurt myself, so striking out on my own appears to be the route I need to take. That said, I’ve never done that before, so the task of starting a business – any business – is an exercise that will thrust me into the entrepreneurial mindset and ideally help me financially in the near term while setting up something far greater in the long run.

Anyway, I’ll begin updating this daily, and we’ll see where it goes. I believe that people grow more in group dynamics, so if this becomes a community of people striving to overcome their challenges and elevate themselves to new heights, then that would be terrific.