This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Happy Medium
Of course, there’s always the headline entrepreneurs who show up in the local business chronicle as success stories—and that’s fantastic. You can find a few hundred of these people each year in the average metropolitan area. For my first book, I met with dozens of entrepreneurs, and they are proud of their success. They’ve made it through the obstacle course. But for every person who has been successful, there are ten people who wish they could make that leap—but at the end of the day, they just can’t do it. That’s the reality of America. The long-term benefit of starting your own company is you have a tangible asset to sell. Building and then exiting a business may take years of toil. Many people find that instead of starting their own businesses, it’s worth it for them to find a happy medium: using an entrepreneurial mindset even if they’re in a corporate environment.
The very thing that made these entrepreneurs successful—their entrepreneurial mindset—can be practiced at our jobs. We can learn to think and act with an attitude of ownership over our careers at any size company—large or small—so that we take back the control. Control equals freedom, and freedom equals choice. When you feel like you have choices—instead of letting your employer call the shots—you can live a life with less worry. The HUNT methodologies can apply to your corporate job as well. This book is full of examples from people whose stories are proof that the entrepreneurial mindset can help you find security and independence while still working for someone else. I wrote this book because for every person I meet that has a successful business, I meet ten more people who say they feel like they are entrepreneurs working inside of a company. That second group has found the middle ground by leveraging their employer’s resources.
The people in this book share the stories of how they took ownership of their careers, how they grew to feel more in control, earned and asked for a bigger slice of the pie, and ultimately built wealth. They ran their careers as if they were their own companies. That’s what made them sleep well at night. And as a financial planner working under the auspices of a large wealth management firm, I feel like I fit in with this group as well.