Buying Personalized Gifts

I spoke to my sister today to wish her a happy birthday. I asked about what they were doing to celebrate. Then, somehow, I don’t remember how, I started talking about a new personalized photo gift my favorite client just started selling. I’ve been involved in gift marketing since 1999, working part time on it for about eight years. In March of 2007, my employer of 25 years decided that staff reductions would require my personal active participation. At the time, my boss at the "big company" was a nice guy and smart, a great combination, and he asked me what my plan was. I’ll send him a link to this just to let him know that I lived thru the whole experience of losing a job fairly well. It was my first time, so I didn’t really know what to expect. Getting back to the story, he asked me what my plan was.

I told him that I would start my own Search Engine Marketing Firm. He asked me if I was hiring. The recession in the technology industry was underway long before the banking crisis hit in 2008. And, in the office where I worked, during 2006 and 2007 we went through layoff after layoff. Finally, they got to me. I really underestimated how far behind the technology curve I actually was. Ironically, I was part of the reason for the very technological shifts which were now impacting my employer’s bottom line.

For a long time, I was one of the "goto guys". That’s the guy or gal in a team that everyone else goes to for solutions. Unfortunately, this eventually results in thinking that riding the wave of a great product would never end. And, that is not how technology is. That wave will eventually meet land and when it does it will be gone forever. I always really knew that, but daily life for 21 years straight seemed to contradict the knowledge that the software technology I knew so well would certainly one day be obsolete.

Engineers, especially software engineers, are responsible for creating products that eliminate jobs by creating technology. As I was excellent at programming I thought I was employable. But, what I didn’t count on was that since I had gotten my last job the average age of hiring managers was now half of MY age. Age discrimination laws do not stop age discrimination; one has to be inclined to make an issue out of it if you think it might have happened. Even if you do that, you are really helping those who come after you, rather than yourself. I grew up during a critical time during the civil rights movement and I understand that what is lawful is not necessarily ethical and the reverse is also true.

Rather than trying to swim upstream, I made a decision to get some “in demand” skills instead of trying to live in the past and “right” any “wrongs” that may have crossed my path. My only regret now is in taking six months to make that decision. I really should have started out with two months of intense psychotherapy to clear my head, but everyone kept telling me that it wasn’t my fault. I knew this wasn’t true, but I tried to believe them for six months. The entire problem of being depressed is that your judgment is impaired. When your judgment is impaired, you cannot execute decisions requiring good judgment because your judgment is impaired. In the software world this is commonly known as an infinite loop.

In Donald Lofland’s book, entitled "Thought Viruses", Dr. Lofland describes this phenomenon and its solutions. Sadly, even with the knowledge of Dr. Lofland’s book, my judgement remained impaired. I was trapped in a continuous cycle of believing that I could find a new job like my old one, if only I would get my resume right and send it to the right company. I was waiting for something to break me out of this insidious thought loop. In the software engineering world, we call that "something" a hardware interrupt. Finding a new job like my old one would never happen because the world had changed. I would have known that sooner had my judgement been working. I had always wanted to start my own consulting business. But, it took Dr. Napoleon Hill’s book, “Think and Grow Rich” to break me out of my debilitating infinite thought loop, which Dr. Lofland describes as a thought virus.

I’ve now read that book cover to cover three times (during the past 25 months). And, each time I understand more of what Dr. Hill hoped to teach everyone in the country. It was written and first published during the height of the Great Depression of the 1930’s. If I had to describe its message in one sentence, I’d have to say that it’s “reality is exactly what you think it is”. This sounds trite until you understand and believe that you can 1. Permanently change your thought patterns and then 2. Take the necessary actions to actually do that. The foundation of this for me was understanding that thoughts are things plus the secret of Chapter 13 which is hidden in plain sight.

So, I formed a company, setup a web site, and waited for the phone to ring. It didn’t. I attribute this to not having the skills needed for the business that I was in. I’m only now, 25 months later, getting the technical and marketing results required. And, I now have a level of self confidence, a gift really, that you can’t buy anywhere and no one can give to you, aside from your Mom or your teachers or someone who YOU personally respect. I can focus every day on helping clients build their businesses. In that process, I learn how to do that more efficiently.

My Mom always believed that you make your own luck. I think that she had read Dr. Hill’s book, as did her Mom. Oddly, they never insisted that I read it. I’m sure that there was a copy in the house where she grew up. But, by the time I was born it was boom times again and the Great Depression was a somewhat fading memory. By the way, you can not only find Dr. Hill’s book in every bookstore in the United States, but you can find multiple editions. Its messages are timeless, not personalized, and apply to most everyone. “That which the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve”, Napoleon Hill. This is the book that all of the self help guru’s of the last 75 years read before they became self help gurus. Need to change your life? Read "Think and Grow Rich" until you have the change that you require. Go and get it; read it; do it. It’s a true gift to humanity. <play the theme song here, Hold on Tight by ELO, itunes>