Disclaimer: I'm writing this post in the hour I have waiting for my daughter's dance class to end. End of my work day Wednesday last week I was hit with the task to come up with a presentation for next Tuesday (today) so I've been racking my brain trying to figure out what I'm going to say. Definitely not an ideal situation since I usually require at least a week to prepare something half-way decent. But I'm a firm believer God only sends you tests he knows you are ready to pass, and even if it's not going to be your best work you will learn something from the experience and grow from it so bring it on! So if I miss something in this post I apologize in advance and will address it in the next post.

As I mentioned in my first post, I've been holding the idea in my mind that I needed to figure out a way to escape from the rat race and live a more fulfilling life. There were three obvious places I could put the money I've been saving:

1. Put it towards the mortgage
2. Invest in stocks
3. Start a business

I'll save you the suspense and just tell you I went with option #3. Not that there weren't valid reasons for choosing the other two, but the main reason why I chose option #3 was because it sounded way more fun and rewarding than the other two!

So, continuing my story from the first paragraph, it was important that I hold the idea that "I want to start a business" in my thoughts at all times. The reason? I was trying to get the reticular activating system to work for me.

Reticular-what now?!?

For those who haven't heard of it, the reticular activating system or RAS is the subconscious part of your brain where the thoughts you keep determine what you notice in your day-to-day and everything else gets filtered out. I'll give you an example: remember the last time you were interested in buying a car? Let's say it was a grey honda civic. You'd do research on it, look at different models and finally decide on the one you want. Now, did you notice that you see that same honda civic you were so focused on everywhere? You ask yourself: "How come I never noticed it before now?" The reason is that your brain realized that that particular car was important to you and stopped filtering it from your world! Pretty cool right? My mind was literally blown when I found that out. Our thoughts really do determine our reality. If you'd like to hear more about the RAS let me know and I'll do a post about it down the line. But if you want something now, Tony Robbins and Les Brown both have excellent videos on youtube about it.

Back to the fateful day when Jeff and I were hanging out on his couch watching our kids play in a tiny toddler bouncer in his living room. As we observed the kids jump and slide, giggling and literally having the time of their lives (and I have to note we didn't have to worry about them banging their heads, falling down or wanting to be carried) Jeff casually mentioned "those bouncer guys make so much money. All they do is drop it off, pick it up and get paid. We should do something like that." Earlier that year I was at Agnes' (my wife's) cousins' house and witnessed how easy (it seemed) bouncer guys made money. I was already wondering how hard it would be run that sort of business so I said "Why not?" I already knew Jeff had the ability and the drive to hustle since he was in the same boat as me (supporting a wife and 2 young kids) and he had already started a few ventures on his own. We started talking about how we would run it, who we could buy bouncers from, how much a typical bouncer would rent for and who our competition would be. At first it was just us messing around with ideas, but the longer we talked the more serious we got about it. When we finally wrapped up our grand "plan" two hours had passed and I said to Jeff "Hey, I knew we were just messing around, but if you're down to give this a shot I am." And Jeff flashed his trademark smile and said the phrase I've heard countless times now "I'm always down to make some money."

So I began looking into acquiring our first bouncer. This process took maybe 3 months from the time we found one we liked to actually receiving it. I'll continue the story of the process of getting the first bouncer in my next post. As always, please let me know of ways I can improve. If you have a minute, please follow me on twitter and instagram (@avgdadhangout) on the links at the bottom of the page and have a great day!

PS: If you're wondering how I did in my presentation, it got bumped because of the weather so I got all psyched up for it and it didn't go down. Ah well, at least my power point slides are done!