Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.
~Goethe
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
~ Henry David Thoreau
My original dream was to be a stay-at-home wife and mother—but God had other plans for me. I became a computer programmer when I was 21 years old and figured I would do that (since I had to work) until I had the means to quit my job and stay home with my children. That turned into a 30+ year career in Information Technology that enabled me to travel and live abroad in the South of France.
However, I was never really satisfied with my life in the corporate world and became increasingly unhappy with it as time went on, despite the ability to travel that it afforded me. About 9 years ago, I started reading self-development books as an aid to figuring out what I really wanted to do with my life.
My personal life had fallen apart (more than once) and my children had grown up. I had reached a point where I knew I didn’t ever want to retire, but I wanted to have work that I really loved and I wanted my freedom and autonomy. And I wanted to have control over how much money I made rather than have someone else decide my salary.
Soul searching
After a lot of searching my own heart and soul and doing various exercises from books like ‘Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow‘ by Marsha Sinetar, I figured out that what I wanted to do was renovate beat-up houses.
I dearly love taking anything that is neglected, run-down, and ugly and turning it into something beautiful and useful. Another thing I love is reading. I read lots of other books, too, like Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill and books by Og Mandino, Norman Vincent Peale, Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, Robert Schuler, and others, and I wrote out my goals. All the while my life in the corporate world went on and I began to want out very badly.
During a brief period in 2000 when I lived in Atlanta, I joined the Georgia Real Estate Investors’ Association, went to their Investor Boot Camp and bought a couple of real estate investing courses, and thought I was going to get started renovating houses part-time. However, I still didn’t have any definite plans to achieve my goals and I ended up moving to France for a second time for my job, this time to Paris.
Turning point
Then two years ago in March 2003 while living and working in Paris, I read As a Man Thinketh by James Allen. That book touched me more profoundly than any other that I’ve read before or since. It hit me right between the eyes that where I was in my life was a result of my own habitual thinking. With time, “head knowledge” became “heart knowledge,” and that makes all the difference.
I dug deep and found a new determination to actually start taking action to make my dream come true. I spent a great deal of time crafting my Life Vision and began to read it every single morning.
Then things began to happen. At the end of August 2003, it was announced that the headquarters team I was working on was going to be eliminated and everyone on it had to find another job within the company.
There were many rumors of layoffs and I was hoping that it would happen and that I would be on the list. I was on a French contract and a layoff would have meant up to a year’s salary as severance pay. Moving back to the States and starting a real estate investing business seemed much easier for me. If I were laid off, the company would pay for my move in addition to the severance package. I figured that with a nice severance and my 401K money I would have enough to keep me going for at least 6-9 months while I got my business started. So I went for it
