Living my dream
I am often greeted by a few people when I ask how their day is going. Their response is “living my dream!” and that has raised my thoughts to “am I living my dream?” To which I think, nope, no, and nada. I did not in my wildest dream think of this! Working at a big box retail store.
Let me explain.
When I was in my late teens, my thought was when I retire at 40, I would be living in a timber frame cabin on the Peshtigo River. The cabin would face the river, have a large fireplace with large windows overlooking the river. I would be sitting in a large, overstuffed chair, and have an end table with books piled high to read. As the snowflakes as big as boxcars started falling, the fireplace blazing, I would pop a cork on my whisky bottle and pour myself a whiskey in glass and contemplate how great my life is.
Another dream was to build a carpenter/remodeler business and work my way across Wisconsin to where I grew up.
Then there was the thought of becoming a Chippendale dancer. And I joined the Fred Astaire Dance Studio. That was a really fleeting dream. While I could tango, cha-cha, do the swing dances, it was far from being a dancer of my dreams, and that dream was thrown into the trashcan.
So, I decided to follow my career path of carpentry and become journeyman carpenter building homes and ramrodding crews as a foreman. Over the years, I built homes from 150k upward to 25 million and 20,000 square feet. But mostly, I was building homes for 500k to 1ml. The ride was fun. Along the way, I became an estimator, then a senior estimator, along with training as a quality evaluator in Baldrige Criteria and ISO9000
When the housing crashed in 2008, I was laid off as a senior estimator from a large contractor. I found myself doing some inner work of what to do now and landed on the idea of building tiny homes and planning, designing, building tiny homes. Another dream was launched. Some were saying that starting a business in a recession is a bad idea. Ah, naysayers are a dime a dozen at times.
Then I found my greatest joy and dream by being a father to 3 sons and grandfather to 11 grandchildren.
• “You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.” —Zig Ziglar
• “Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working.” —Pablo Picasso
• “Don't settle for average. Bring your best to the moment. Then, whether it fails or succeeds, at least you know you gave all you had.” —Angela Bassett
• “Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.” —Isabel Allende
• “Don't bunt. Aim out of the ballpark. Aim for the company of immortals.” ―David Ogilvy
• “I have stood on a mountain of no’s for one yes.” —Barbara Elaine Smith
• “If you believe something needs to exist, if it's something you want to use yourself, don't let anyone ever stop you from doing it.” —Tobias Lütke
• "More is lost by indecision than wrong decision.” —Marcus Tullius Cicero
• "If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever." —Thomas Aquinas
• "You can be the ripest, juiciest peach in the world, and there's still going to be somebody who hates peaches." —Dita Von Teese
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