Coffee with Mike- A Matter of Perspective

You know, you go through your life and you figure out, you figure out that you thought something was important and then, "Oh I need that, I want that, I'm going to have that," and you get it and then you never use it. It just sits down there, it sits down the garage, sits down in the in the basement, or somewhere, you know it's like, "man I never really used that."  And you think, "Man what a waste of money!" But somewhere down the line, someone else needs it and uses it, and it becomes something that's valuable to them, and that means- that could mean- that it's been valuable to you just because it was valuable to somebody else. 

So it's just a matter of perspective- about how you, what you accumulate, how you accumulated it to begin with, and why it's actually there later. What's the reason for its existence later? I think that's life right there. It's like, "I think I'm going to do this for my life," and you end up doing some career for your life, whatever it is. I was going to be a pastor. I came into my senior year of high school thinking that I'm going to be a pastor, I'm going to be a minister. 

So for the next several years from 19 to 33, I was a minister. I was minister of a church that was as big as 7000 people, and I was minister of church that was as few as 29 people. I was in downtown Houston and I was in in the middle of nowhere Waddy, Kentucky. In fact I wasn't even in Waddy, I was way out there in the boonies. And you think, "oh this is why I'm doing this, because I want to get to the next step, or I'm going to build my resume, and I'm going to get to the next place." And really, in my life now, I was 19 when I started, I was 33 when I left full time ministry. I did not want to be- I did not want to be a full time minister after that. I thought people said to me, "What a waste. What a waste of your education. So you went to seminary and got a degree. What a waste." 

Well, turns out it wasn't such a waste, because it's actually helped me think. It helped me learn how to think. They help me learn how to think in a deeper way that I wasn't challenged to do when I was in college, and deal with people's problems, and you know problems that seemed insurmountable to them or devastating to them. I had to think about, "Well, how can we look at this? How can we begin to work with this situation? How can we begin to recover from this situation? How can we begin to limit the situation?"

And being a pastor all of a sudden gave me insight on what relationships really were, and what problems really are. I went into the financial industry thinking, "Oh man, I want to be a financial industry, I don't want to be I want to be a part of that, because you know, when a pastor is no longer pastor, her becomes an insurance agent. Right? I mean, my gosh! I don't want to be an insurance agent! But for 9 years I was an insurance agent for a major company. It turned out that being a pastor helped me be a good insurance agent. Then I stopped doing that and I started doing seminars. Turns out that being an insurance agent and being a pastor helps me become a really good seminar presenter, and then not only that, but I can just go on, and on, and on. Now we're doing these videos, we're teaching online, and we're doing things.
 
I just think that there are certain reasons we start out doing something, and then there's the real reason when you look back and you say, "Oh my gosh, I can see the trail! I can see the trail of where all this, how this led to where I am now, and I'm so happy to be where I am right now. Yeah that was a bit of a trail, that kind of made me cry every now and then, maybe feel lonely now and then maybe feel depressed every now and then made me feel like a failure every now and then. Also made me feel pretty good sometimes. Maybe feel like a success sometimes. Made me feel like I was I was going the right way. Then, you know, it all just comes together to end up fulfilling what you really want.

So what I'm saying to you is, wherever you are in your career, if you're just starting out, don't get caught up on the ambition so much that you miss the moment of what you're really learning. When you're in the middle of your career and you're kind of feeling burnout, don't get so wrapped up in, "what have I really accomplished, or what I'm really accomplishing in terms of the building of a career," when really it's been about how you built relationships, and what you've learned from those relationships. When you get to the end, it's like retirement, it's not like I'm going to get rid of all my influence, that I want to get rid of all my significance. It's not that I'm trying to move to an area, or move into an area of life where I am less active. I'm just trying to take everything I've got, and use it in such a way that it makes us, it makes me feel more valuable to other people, and especially when they seem to appreciate it. 

So that's what we're doing here, we're just taking everything that we've gained along the way, all this stuff that we've acquired along the way, where we thought we were chasing a certain type of career, when really, we were building a life. We were building these skills, these life skills, and these life relationships that allow us to maximize our time, our money, and our energy now. So just thought I'd throw that perspective out there, and again what we're trying to do is we're just trying to provide perspective, a different way of looking at things. 

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