Summary: Thank you so much for listening to this podcast and reading my blog. You make all of this possible and I appreciate you so much. I can’t believe this is episode 100. Here’s to a few hundred more! Today, I want to share some of my own stories with you to give you a quick snapshot of my journey. From this, you will quickly see that when you expect easy, you’ll only get difficult. This is because success was never meant to be easy. Success takes hard work, which is the only way to produce results. There are no shortcuts here.<br> I can remember sitting on my roof many humid nights as a teenager in Alabama, looking up at the stars, dreaming of all the possibilities to come. You’re probably wondering how I got on my roof, so I’ll let you in. I did this by climbing a wobbly antenna, then leaping over onto the slanted roof shingles, and finally scrambling my way up to the spot between the chimney and the downward sloping section of the roof. I would use the brick chimney as a backrest, creating the most comfortable position I could find to view the sky above. Now that we have that out of the way, on with the important stuff.<br> <br> Of course, there were far fewer responsibilities then, so dreaming big wasn’t difficult. I knew I wanted to travel the world a million times over, I knew I wanted to be in a rock band, and I knew I wanted to make tons of money without having to go to work. Sounds like the normal dreams of a thirteen-year-old, right? But, even though these are the dreams I had, none of these things happened. I have never been out of the United States, I quit playing drums in a band years ago, and as soon as I turned sixteen and wanted a car, I found out that work was necessary to make money. All of these things would have required different decisions, more fighting for what I wanted, and more work along the way to make them happen.<br> This idea of putting in the work also translates to my marriage, which I dreamed would resemble an effortless fairy tale, but again I was wrong. If anyone tells you that having a great marriage doesn’t require work, they are lying. But, know that working on marriage is always worth the extra effort.<br> The same principle applies to my first four years of college. I dreamed that university would be easy, but these years took more effort than I could have ever imagined. I can remember taking a 5:30 a.m. math class to fit it in before work, only to return to school for two more classes after work. Wow, am I glad I don’t have to take any more 5:30 a.m. classes, but I’m sure you have a similar story of having to put in the work. How do I know that? Because anything worth having doesn’t come easy.<br> Fast forward to chasing the career that I thought was my dream, only to be told that it wasn’t going to go as planned. After ten years, I left that career, only to encounter more letdowns. I then decided that I didn’t want to work for someone else anymore, but I needed to work on building my own businesses. Is building businesses easy? Again, it’s a “no.” Ninety to one hundred hour work weeks aren’t for the faint of heart, but that’s what it takes to run multiple businesses.<br> So, why do I share all of these stories with you? Because I dreamed of living an easy life, but all I ended up with was the reminder that work is the only way to make dreams and expectations meet reality.<br> At some points, we’ve all come short of what we truly wanted from life. But the beauty is found in the things we didn’t see coming, which were lessons in disguise all along. In fact, life is one big classroom, reminding us of the need to be aware of our surroundings. What has my life taught me? The need for a better work ethic, the importance of perseverance, the power to fight for what I believe in, the dissatisfaction of not giving life my all,
