“You are the author of your own life story.”
At what point do you start questioning what its all about? Why are you here? Why have you done the things you’ve done up until this point in time? And maybe more importantly, what’s next?
You go to school because those are the rules. You get a degree because that’s the next step in getting ahead in life. You end up at a job that provides the money (yet maybe not the satisfaction). You get married and have a family. You run around day after day accomplishing a ton, yet never really feeling like you’ve reached your potential.
And you dream about so much more.
That is the premise behind Vision of Success.
I started out in a similar manner. I lived in a middle class neighborhood with a mom, dad, sister, dog, and the white picket fence. (Okay, maybe not the white picket fence.) I went to a great high school and graduated in the top of my class. My parents put me through college so I would have it even better than they had it. I married my best friend. We found the 9 to 5 jobs and the house in the suburbs.
Then something happened.
I watched my father spend seven years of his life interviewing and re-interviewing for his position with the “stable” company he had worked at for 25 years. I watched the stress build, his attitude change, and his health decline. I watched him count down the days until he could retire at 55, gain a decent pension, and try his hand at something new. And then he died of a massive heart attack two and a half months before his 55th birthday.
Something clicked that day. And a lot in my life changed.
I was already facing layoffs, cutbacks, and job insecurity in my own position. Andrew had faced three layoffs in three years. Was this really the path we wanted for ourselves? We weren’t even 30 years old, and the stress was already flying in.
So we stopped everything, reevaluated our lives, and started over from scratch.
We started a photography studio and built it up to be one of the premier studios of its time. We were selling online and built up a phenomenal web presence at a time when the online gurus were saying we couldn’t do it. In the late 1990’s, we had over 20,000 images online. They kept telling us to take them down, we couldn’t succeed doing it that way … most people accessed the Internet through dial-up. There was no way people would spend time on our site letting that many images load. We proved them wrong.
Taken from our book, Being A Bride
In 2001, we were at the top of the photographic industry, specializing in weddings. We traveled to photograph brides and grooms from many different cultures, in many different locations. When people began asking, “How’d you do that?”, we designed a new business to answer that question. And Vision Of Success was born.
Fast forward to today.
Today we no longer photograph weddings; we retired from weddings when our daughter wanted to spend her weekends playing soccer and hanging out with mom and dad. It’s hard to travel every weekend and be away from your child during the only free time she has.
So we redesigned our life. We started a series of online marketing businesses to help people build small businesses and lifestyles that weren’t engrained in the 9 to 5 belief system. We became experts at online marketing and small business marketing.
And we discovered some very simple steps to take whenever you discover you want to make a change in your life. Change doesn’t have to be scary. In fact, in can be quite exhilarating.
With a daughter who is finishing her last years in high school and heading off to college soon, we’re once again looking at our lifestyle – and making a huge change.
We’re designing our lifestyle so we can live anywhere, work anywhere, and do things to enjoy life, not live with our noses to the grindstone. We’ve sold our house, sold off a great majority of our possessions, and are making plans for the future. Where we’ll head off to first is still up in the air – right now we’re working with our high school senior daughter and helping her determine her next steps. But we’re doing it all from an apartment with 1200 sf. And we’re having the time of our lives.
Vision of Success is about envisioning what you want your life to look like at some point in the future, and creating the plans necessary to make it a reality. What it looks like is different for everyone; but success is easy to measure once you know what to look for.
Join us as we show you how we’re approaching the newest phase of our own journey, and how you can use the same strategies to help you discover how you can change the days, weeks, months and years that are in your near future, and start living the dream lifestyle you know is meant to be.
To Your Success,
Lori
