39 Years Around the Sun

Monday was my birthday, and as I enter my final years in my 30’s (wild), I want to reflect back on what this year has taught me.

38 was a great trip around the sun, but the highlight for me was becoming a Father.

It’s one of those moments where nothing can prepare you for. You spend 40ish weeks counting down the days until everything changes (in a good way), but it’s surreal.

This forced me to do a lot of soul searching how I wanted my life to look once my daughter made her arrival.

I had spent the better part of the spring into the summer restructuring my business so that my life could be even more flexible.

This meant figuring out a sales process built on trust to a level that sales calls could be removed from the process, adding a new version of our existing offer with a different tier of support, and just having this blind faith that the universe has my back for it to all work out.

Business is wild, because along the way, you collect all these beliefs that you think are true.

What your business should look like, “grow or die” mentality, how to scale the business as though there is only one correct way… but that’s not how I viewed business and for a long time I felt like an outlier with my beliefs.

And this is where admittedly most entrepreneurs struggle with the comparison game. We put ourselves in positions where we are building someone else’s version of business and eventually we find ourselves out of alignment wondering why we are even more stressed out than before.

But my daughter being born in October forced me to challenge everything I believed about business and truly build one that was designed around our lives as we entered this new phase as a family.

As a recovering over-achiever, I’ve constantly put a lot of pressure on myself to continue to grow, evolve, whatever you want to call it. And what I realized from this reflection is that it prevented me from being present a lot of the time. Physically I was there, but mentally I would be elsewhere.

This was something I knew had to change this year, because my family was going to need more from me than just the financial side of what business can bring. This may be an overgeneralization, but I think for a lot of men, we truly consider this our main obligation to the family unit. While the money side is definitely important, I don’t think anybody wants to rely on that and be miserable and disconnected, at least I know I don’t

Now, I’m writing this on Monday May 4th, my actual birthday… and realizing I’ve built exactly what I needed for this phase of life.

Admittedly, sometimes I feel this pull back to the hustle… I think that will always be there, but the slower pace is where growth is actually happening for me. I am being tested in everything I say and getting my chance to live my values and define my beliefs.

All while blocking out the noise of what everyone else says life should look like.

So as I close out the final year of this decade, it’s likely entering the best years of life.

And the mission is to construct the business in a way to never miss the moments that will only happen once.

I hope this inspires you to do the same.

Cheers to another year.