Statement of Mission

Hello, and welcome to my new blog! I'm starting this blog with a single-minded mission in mind. I want to be a marketer. I want to be a marketer so bad, that I'm not willing to wait until I'm hired on as a marketer, I want to start by marketing my most important product- myself! With that in mind, I'd like to say a little something-something about myself so you can all get to know me better.

First, I've lived in Arizona my whole life. I went to Thew Elementary, Connolly AND McKemy Middle Schools, and attended McClintock High School. Growing up, the one thing I felt was missing in my life was direction. I started going to Mesa Community College right after high school, but I didn't really know what I wanted to do from there. All my life I've been told that a degree is a degree, and as long as you have one, you'll be able to get a great job, so when I declared my major, I went with what I found most personally appealing rather than what would guarantee a high paying job. I now know that's not true, but what a difference a few years in the job market will make.

That desire for direction was finally changed when I went to Mississippi to do relief work after Hurricane Katrina, an experience that has had a profound impact on my life. I dropped all my classes at MCC, and headed to the South. After coming home from Mississippi, I had two goals in mind:

• To learn a little about how houses were made because after any sort of disaster, rebuilding peoples' homes will be the absolute MOST helpful thing you can do to relieve the stress, anxiety, and hardship that people are experiencing. Plus, I figured knowing how to work on my own home would save me a lot of money over time.
• To learn about people. At the most basic level, I wanted to know how peoples' experiences impacted them? What made people tick? Why do some people make decisions one way, and others a different way?

 So, when I got back, I had a sense of the direction I wanted to go in life. I started working with my father, who was a house painter, cabinet/furniture refinisher, and all around remodeler. It was a great experience. I learned a lot about how homes are built, and how to properly repair, texture, and paint walls. We did a full remodel in his home, taking the walls down to the frame, moving some walls, adding flooring and a whole new kitchen! It was great experience, and allowed me to seek out my own opportunities for a time (until the financial collapse in 2008 largely dried up work). So my first goal was pretty well realized. There was a lot I didn't know, but I was confident that I would be able to do my part in any other sort of post-natural disaster relief effort.

As for the second goal, I went right back to school. I finished at MCC without wasting any more time and enrolled at ASU (Go Devils!) to get started on my BA in Psychology. And I got almost exactly what I wanted out of that- I learned a great deal about people, and my relationships with friends, family, and especially my wife are so much more fulfilling because I learned how to relate to and communicate with other people so much more effectively. Not to mention that I better understand how to solve interpersonal problems.

When I graduated school, having felt that I accomplished most of what I wanted, I was left again to wonder what the future held for me. I took the first job I found that was better than my current job, and I would come to find that was a mistake. Rather than think about what I wanted to get out of life, I took the easy road and started working 3rd shift maintenance for a local hospital.

 That job wore on me, with little opportunity to advance, little direction from management, and the weight of constantly shrinking hospital budgets leaving myself and others to only guess about whether or not we would have a job from day to day, week to week, or month to month. But the worst part about working that job, is that I was not pursuing my own future. Departing from there was perhaps the best opportunity I'll ever have to set that right.

I've spent a great deal of time thinking about my future as I pursue a new job. In that time I've realized that my skills, talents, desires, and indeed my very nature, point to an obvious career. I should be in marketing. No, I need to be in marketing. It's a career I will be good at. It's a career I will love. It's a career that will make the full use of my experiences, of my skills, and of my life. So here I am, pursuing that career with everything I've got. I'll keep you posted on how it goes!