For years, I felt like the guy who was still searching for his thing, while everyone else seemed to have their entire life figured out.

For me, it was fast-food, dine-in restaurants, department stores, warehouses, and factories. Each time I switched directions, I’d tell myself, ‘This could be my golden ticket.’ But each time I left, people would shake their heads as if they’d seen me purchase a one-way ticket to regret.

But the real disappointment arose when I started to believe them. Needless to say, that’s how I ended up in the cab of an 18-wheeler, doing my best to drive as far away from failure as possible. But little did I know that the same failure I was running from would propel me toward what I’d been searching for all along. 

See, I’d been thinking about it all wrong. Those weren’t career mistakes—they were chapters. Every frustrated manager who read me wrong, every coworker who had concluded I was just a “job hopper,” and anyone who ever said “when are you going to get serious about life?” —including the voice in my head at times —which were all giving me pieces of a vision that wasn’t mine to accept.

The same kind of stories that millions of people feel they’re living right now. Stuck in jobs that pay the bills but give them no thrill. Believing they’re faulty because they want something different. This has convinced them that their experiences don’t matter because they don’t fit the traditional definition of success.

I’d lived that story from the inside. I know exactly how they feel. And that’s when it hit me: That was not my story to settle for. And it’s not yours either. That’s why I help others write their own stories.