Summary: Has our devotion to work and hustle turned into the UnAmerican Dream?<br> Some of the hardest working people I know are in sales and marketing.<br> We often read success stories about how hustle and grit drove fantastic success.<br> That said, the relentless pursuit of success can leave behind damaged relationships and personal life carnage in its wake.<br> Take me, for example.<br> Shortly after building up and selling a successful company, my 17-year marriage ended.<br> There’s a reason entrepreneurs have a higher divorce rate.<br> For me. My pursuit of business success left my health and my personal relationships in a severe need of help.<br> I needed to redefine the kind of life I wanted to live, make different choices, and set better boundaries.<br> It wasn’t easy.<br> Now, my health, relationships, and personal and professional happiness are so much better.<br> That’s why I was excited to interviewed Carlos Hidalgo (<a href="https://twitter.com/cahidalgo">@cahidalgo</a>), CEO of <a href="https://www.visumcx.com/">VisumCX</a> and author of the new book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/UnAmerican-Dream-Professional-Establishing-Boundaries/dp/1937985571/">The UnAmerican Dream</a>.<br> In this interview, you’ll hear Carlos’s story about finding personal and professional happiness and establishing work-life boundaries.<br> This is a must-read for sellers, marketers, and entrepreneurs.<br> Can you tell our listeners a little bit about your background?<br> Carlos: Yeah. Hey Brian. Always a pleasure to talk to you. I have been in B2B marketing and sales for over 20 years. I think right now it’s about 25 years, which is hard to believe.<br> I’ve been both client-side, and then in 2005, I co-founded an agency. That agency is still running. I left that agency at the end of 2016, beginning of 2017 to start another business. So, could say I’m a bit of an entrepreneur. I love creating things.<br> Now, I work with B2B companies in the whole area of customer experience under the new brand VisumCX, and then just wrote my second book.<br> The first book was on demand generation, so if you ever have insomnia, go for it. You can read that.<br> But this book was the UnAmerican Dream, which is more my story and a whole lot more personal than the first one.<br> Why did you write The UnAmerican Dream?<br> <a href="http://www.markempa.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/TheUnAmericanDream.jpg"></a><br> The UnAmerican Dream<br> Brian: Can you tell the story about why you wrote this book, The UnAmerican Dream, and why now?<br> Carlos: Yeah, great question. When I left Annuitas, which was the first company that I had co-founded and started, I put a <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-i-decided-leave-annuitas-carlos-hidalgo/">post on LinkedIn about why I was going</a>.<br> It was more to get back to what I should have been doing in the first place, which was cultivating those meaningful relationships, especially with my children and marriage.<br> I was struck by the number of calls and emails I got from fellow entrepreneurs and fellow business leaders who were saying,<br> “So, how did you do this? What steps did you take because I am at my wit’s end? I’m never seeing my family,” or “My marriage is falling apart,” or insert whatever they were going through.<br> I was shocked.<br> Wow, this is not just me going through this.<br> So, that’s why.<br> But the why now, is the idea of that book came to me over two years ago.<br> But I needed to work on me first.<br> I had to get some things straight in me, and one of those things that I start with the introduction, I believe, saying I first had the idea in 2016.<br> When I told somebody the title, they said, “It sounds like an angry book.”<br> I believe if I had written it then, it would have been an angry book because I had a lot of things that I had to work through and deconstruct some things that I had held to be true which wer...
