Sometimes the greatest challenges in your life can lead you to your true purpose and passion. Losing a million dollars was excruciating and it took me a while to recover. I kept asking myself a lot of questions. How could a successful person who had not only never failed, but achieved some level of success in the corporate world at a relatively young age, crash and burn so badly? Why didn’t I see this coming before it was too late? What could I have done differently? After months of self-reflection, I had to admit to myself that I had often experienced hiccups along the way, although not to this extreme. By hiccups, I mean times when things were going along just fine, and then all of a sudden they weren’t. But now I needed answers. If I didn’t understand what I had done or why, then it was possible I could do it all again and maybe self-destruct—even worse.

It wasn’t just about how I lost a million dollars. My questions were more fundamental: Who was I, if not the job I had or the role I played? Over the next several years I continued searching for answers and began studying psychology, sociology, western and eastern philosophers, leadership, neuroscience, and even quantum physics. When I began to reflect on and synthesize all these ideas, I realized that the core reason I had hiccups along the way, and ultimately crashed and burned, was because of my inherent subjectivity. The problem did not stem so much from the business decisions I did or did not make, but in how I framed my world—the underlying assumptions that drove my perceptions and responses to the people, circumstances, and events in my life. What I learned was that being happy, effective, and successful requires wrestling with my inherent subjectivity and practicing objectivity.

With this new understanding, it was clear to me that if I wanted to respond differently, I had to change my mind about what I fundamentally believed about myself, others, and the world. I began to reevaluate all my assumptions and found that the way I was framing my world was not serving me very well. Things that I learned and accepted as true when I was younger were no longer true for me yet these assumptions were still guiding my behavior. I found that many of my ideas and beliefs were based in insecurity, fear, and self-doubt and that these beliefs were clouding my perception and interpretation of everything I experienced. The fear-based lens through which I perceived the world did not just contribute to my failed business; it was also negatively affecting my interactions with the people in my life.

I finally understood that my experience of the world was, in fact, in my mind. I knew that my happiness and my success depended on my ability to be objective, to see and accept things as they are. After a lot of honest and painful self-reflection, I was able to rethink many of my fear- and insecurity-based beliefs. Overtime, I was able to rebuild my self-concept so that it was less dependent on other’s approval. I began to redefine not only who I was, but also what I was relative to everything and everyone else. I also began to reassess how I valued myself so that my self-worth was less tied to the job I had, the title I held, or the role I played. I began to value and appreciate myself for who I was,not what I did, and along the way, my relationships got better.

Now, I am happier and more successful then I have ever been doing what I love. My life's work is to share what I have learned about the power of seeing things as they are with the hope that it will inspire others to change their life . . . without the need to experience a disorienting event like losing a million dollars. In addition, my goal now is to help transform organizations and institutions with the power of objectivity so that we can create a better world.