Not an April Fool’s post. I am being serious here:

I used to work in a toxic corporate environment (several on end, as a matter of fact!) and dreaded Sunday night. It meant coming up within hours was an immediate immersion into the swarmy mire of office egos, politics, and mismanagement, breaking my mood, within seconds of opening my computer, as I forced myself  to read the backlog of email and memos and assignments. Not to be misunderstood, I was willing to work, but I had my KPIs and my 180s and my 360s to accomplish without interference by some other department head, via my boss, assigning me more to layer on top.

Leaving Corporate America was scary, yet relieving, though harder work for me, still far more enlightening as I was actually performing some palpable good, in this case for me and my clients, instead for an unseen tasker thousands of miles away, so I learned to look forward to Monday morning.

And all the other weekday mornings as well. At 600am every day I saw this picture on my wall, opened my multipreneurial email boxes and prioritized the fires to extinguish, clients’ perceived needs, educational reading in the industry, and looked forward to the phone ringing, bringing new opportunity, introducing a new referral, or something to address for a contact who relied on me.

Then it occurred to me the phone stopped ringing (see this LinkedIn article I wrote just over 10 years ago), but the emails and texts still presented me with full days to prove my worth, items to follow up, all in an effort to leap off tall buildings in a single bound. The stopping locomotives stuff was all trick camerawork, BTW.

Yet I remained ever focused, still do, like the graphic above, to all possibilities, all events, all ideas, all requests, inserting the word “reasonable” as my lawyers advised me as I grew up in my various jobs, because I combined all my past experience to become a solo entrepreneur.

Did you just hear me roar, optimistically? Bring it on.