What I am about to share with you is a story of positive personal change; of perseverance, and ultimately, of the power of love.
But as much as I would like to take credit for some fundamental virtues that seem to be revealed here, I cannot rightly take credit for them. The principles that have made change possible for me have existed since the foundation of time. And my willingness to discover and align myself with these principles, to the small degree that I have, comes from circumstance and not as the result of noble intentions.
I believe that any other person who finds themselves in such a predicament, and who has had similar preceding life experiences as I have had would accordingly respond in the same manner as I have and achieve the same results, or better.
During the late Winter of 2010, I met a woman from the Philippines through an online dating website. Her name is Nida.
After a time, we began to have feelings for each other, and I discovered, contrary to my previous skepticism, that it is indeed possible for two people to fall in love through the internet.
Naturally, it followed that I would want to visit the Philippines to meet her in person, so I applied for a U.S. passport.
But my passport application was denied on the grounds that I was behind on child-support payments. I was informed by the U.S. Department of State that I would have to bring the past due balance to zero before my application could be approved.
This was a problem. Although from my current perspective, I can see that this problem turned out to be the best thing that has ever happened to me financially.
I have a daughter named Beth who was born in 1993. Her mother and I never married, and we eventually dissolved our committed relationship. When she formally sought court-ordered child-support payments, I acknowledged paternity and cooperated with the process.
Thereafter, I made child-support payments, but over time, I fell further and further behind, until at one point, I was just over $23,900 in arrears on my financial obligation.
So when my passport was denied, and I realized the size of the debt I would have to pay off in order to go visit Nida in the Philippines, I felt overwhelmed. I had never been very good at making money in the past, and now I was faced with a situation where I would need to get good at it, and get good at it fast.
As I contemplated my situation, I was reminded of the proverbial collision between the irresistible force and the immoveable object. That is exactly what it felt like for me. And to make matters worse, I had to break the news to Nida.
That was difficult.
As I was going through the process of coming to terms with the task that lay before me, I thought of the popular phrase, “Failure is not an option”. During previous financial endeavors, I had tried to adopt that attitude with all sincerity. But there had been no power behind my efforts to live by those words.
Now, however, the power of such a commitment was just there. There had been no moment of solemn resolution to really mean it this time. The circumstance had simply imposed itself on me.
When I told Nida about the situation, she was, of course, disappointed. And it broke my heart to know that through my past failures, I had set her up for what she was feeling. Facing that reality further hardened my resolve to succeed.
But, just as I had come to terms with the situation, so did she. She agreed to stand by me and face the future together. So we made the commitment.
As of this writing, that was six and a half years ago.
Before I move into describing the events and processes that followed my commitment to the goal, I want to address something that I have thought about many times since that beginning.
I have to ask myself why is it that my love for Nida has proven sufficient to motivate me to undertake these positive changes, but my desire to fully provide my share of Beth's support was not?
It is painful for me to think that my love for anyone else is more powerful than my love for my own daughter.
What I see when I look within myself for the answer to this question, however, is not a matter of one value being more important than the other, it is rather a matter of having reached critical mass when it comes to motivation.
When I fell in love with Nida, and that motivation aligned with my preexisting sense of responsibility to provide for my daughter, the result was much greater than the sum of the two parts. The result was that I had had enough. I was tired of being poor. And although my goal of being with Nida was at the leading edge of my motivation, my shame in having not adequately supported my daughter through the years brought a trainload of momentum behind it.
Yet even with that perfect storm of motivation at my back, the transformation was not immediate. Although from the very start, I knew that I would succeed because that was the only outcome I could accept. I found comfort and power in that certainty.
When I met Nida, I was making wood carvings and selling them locally for a living. So my first plan was to ramp up that business as a means of paying off my child support debt.
To make a long story short, that effort failed. But even then the seeds that would sprout into a new way of thinking and doing things were being planted.
The first seed came in the form of a DVD movie that I was invited to watch. The name of the movie was called “The Secret”.
The essential message of “The Secret” is that we all create the circumstances that unfold in our lives according to the thoughts we think. In short, we are the creators of our own individual realities.
This message came into my life at precisely the right time. I was open to it out of necessity, and I chose to act on the assumption that it was true.
The next seed was a book titled, “The Power of Your Subconscious Mind”, by Dr. Joseph Murphy. This book, as you might guess, explores the vast reservoirs of power that are available to us through our subconscious minds.
I was living in Custer, Washington at that time. In the late Summer of that year, my Sister, Joleen and my Brother-in-Law, George invited me to move up to Montana and live in the vacant apartment in the lower level of their home in Polson. I accepted their offer. In October, I made the move.
By this time, I had been introduced to the basic idea that my level of success in life is determined by my beliefs and my habits, some of which I am not even consciously aware of. And I also learned that no matter how hard I tried, or how much technical knowledge I gained, I could not find any great or lasting success by using willpower alone to override my disabling core beliefs.
The good news, I learned, is that through the use of certain techniques, disabling core beliefs can be replaced by empowering core beliefs, and that habits can be changed with mathematical certainty by gaining an understanding of their mechanisms and employing simple methods.
I also learned something that was very easy for me to believe. And that is that the vital point of power from which all of these principles gain their dynamic effect is the establishment of a deeply felt, all-consuming “Why”.
The reason that it was easy for me to believe in the power of a “Why” is because I already had one.
I had a great desire to make a change, so I began a daily regimen of reading, video studies, affirmations, visualizations, meditations and I even put a “Vision Board” up on the wall of my apartment that measured five feet by ten feet. I plastered it with photos, quotes, and slogans that represented the good things I wanted in my life. And the central focus of it all was my goal of paying off my child support debt and being with Nida.
I gave up on the woodcarving business and joined a Network Marketing company.
The earliest manifestation of my internal progress became evident through one of the methods that I employed in my effort to gain recruits.
There was a leader in the company, named Doug. He led conference calls to train anyone in the organization who wanted to listen in. There would be maybe 50 or 100 of us on the conference call line, and while we listened, he would call up people whose job resume information he had collected from online databases.
As we listened in muted mode, Doug would interview these prospects. He was calling the kind of people who had histories as sales managers, corporate executives, marketing team leaders, and the like. If all went well, he would invite them to visit a website that was designed to take interested prospects to the next level of introduction to the business.
The thought of doing what Doug was doing scared the wits out of me. It was totally outside my comfort zone. But I was committed to doing whatever it took to succeed, and it was time to put that commitment to the test.
When the time came for me to make my first call, the fear welled up so intensely in me that it was almost physically impossible to dial the number.
When the phone rang, I was terrified. And when my first prospect answered the phone, my voice was shaking so badly that it was difficult for me to speak. Without the script in front of me, I do not think I would have been able to put a coherent sentence together.
Even with the script, I did not do well. The prospect was not interested, and he quickly hung up.
I called the next number on my list. Same thing. The prospect hung up.
I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown.
But I thought of Nida, and how she was depending on me to succeed. So I called the next number on my list.
Again and again, I made those calls. And by small degrees, over the course of days, the fear began to wear down.
It started to become less important how the prospect responded, and more important that I just keep trying. A fundamental shift was taking place within me that was far more important than the outcome of those calls.
But eventually, I got someone who was willing to take a look at the website that prospects could go to for more information.
Then the very next person was also interested.
I was ecstatic.
At the end of a day; after I had repeatedly gone into that zone of fear, I had a feeling of elation and triumph that is beyond description. But never-the-less, when night time came, I did not want to go to bed, because I knew that when I woke up in the morning, I would be making phone calls again.
I did this almost every day during the Winter and Spring of 2011.
The value of that experience was not in the success of my recruiting efforts, because by any objective measure, I failed. But through the process of trying, I discovered a quality in myself that I had never tested to that degree before. I made a quantum leap forward internally by facing down my fear and winning.
I later came to understand that this kind of ordeal, in some form or other, is what every achiever of noteworthy success must go through on the path to realizing their dreams. And as much as I would like to credit my cold-calling campaign to courage, in a practical sense that was really not what it was. I had simply gotten myself into a situation where making those phone calls was the least painful of my choices.
That is what a person will do when failure is not an option.
The Network Marketing company collapsed and went out of business in May of 2011, but I was not terribly affected by that event, because in spite of all of my trying, I had not recruited a single soul.
It was at about this time that I remember standing in my apartment looking at all of my personal development books on the shelves, the vision board on the wall, the little positive quotes on the bathroom mirror, the refrigerator, my computer, and everything else that tape would stick to. And I thought of the words written and spoken by the superstars of personal development—words that I had immersed my soul in for ten months.
And I thought to myself, “I'm feeling good about myself. I am positive to the bone, and I am taking actions to facilitate the attraction of success...but where is the money?”
I don't think anyone would have faulted me if I had given up at that point and declared this “Law of Attraction” thing to be a hoax. I had tried. I had tried hard. And I had done the exercises in the books that I read, and I had meditated and visualized faithfully and listened to the audios, and everything else for TEN MONTHS!
But I could not give up. Nida was counting on me succeed. Failure was not an option.
So I kept working on my mindset and I kept looking for a new way to make the money that I needed.
Then something, somewhere in the cosmos must have shifted and clicked, because that is when things began to change.
I heard through the grapevine that the value of base metals was up, and since I had learned the scrap metal business in the 1990's, I went online to get up to speed on that industry, with the idea of possibly getting back into it.
One day, when I entered a Google search of the term “scrap metal”, I stumbled upon an online advertisement for a book on recycling precious metals. I bought it.
That has proven to be the single best business decision I have made in my life so far. And it was the beginning of the end of my aversion to spending money on specialized knowledge.
That book was my introduction to a world that has been very good to me. After reading it through, I went out Yard Sale shopping and made a $900 net profit in a single weekend, even though I knew only a small fraction of what I know now.
I have lost count of the number of $1000+ net profit days I have had since then, and I once made a single day net profit of $2,900. That was extraordinary, but it is just a matter of time before I exceed it.
I returned to Custer, Washington in September of 2011, and continued to buy gold and silver at yard sales until cold weather brought that season to an end. Then I switched to recycling conventional base metals by going door-to-door in rural areas and telling people what I was doing.
Most people had nothing, and frequently, nobody was home. But I scored often enough to do well.
When someone had scrap metal for me to take, I made sure that somewhere during the conversation, I also let them know that I pay cash for scrap gold and silver. More than a few times, this resulted in a double-win in which I not only left their land a little cleaner, but also left their pockets a little greener. And of course, I profited accordingly.
One day, I bought a scrap D-8 bulldozer for $2000, and when all accounts were settled, I had a net profit of just over $4000. $2500 of it went toward payment of my child-support debt.
At about this time, I found a mentor who taught me how to sell on eBay.
A short time later, I found another mentor who introduced me to the business of Drop-Shipping on eBay. Drop-shipping continues to be a very valuable factor in diversifying and stabilizing my income.
In June of 2013, I returned to Montana.
My subsequent experiences in Montana, combined with my travels to Arizona, California, and Oregon have shown me that the Yard Sale Picker/Gold and Silver Buyer skill-set is highly portable. It works wherever I have gone.
All during this time, Nida and I have chatted on Skype at least every other day, and lately it has been every day.
Because I spend a lot of time working, we will often keep Skype open while I attend to my online business. I will be processing orders, or whatever I happen to be doing, and Nida will be pursuing her own online activities.
We spent six and a half years doing this.
In terms of monetary progress, I failed utterly for the first year and a half. I finally began to get some financial traction in the beginning of the third year, but as recently as July of 2014, I still owed more than $18,000.
During the two years since then, however, I have paid off the entire balance and built up a comfortable financial reserve to travel on. My experience is that manifesting positive change has a compounding effect.
Conceptually, it may be easy to agree that love is the most powerful force in creation. But experiencing even a small form of this truth first hand takes the conviction of it to a depth that merely thinking about it cannot reach.
I am convinced that when our purpose is grounded in love, aligned with natural law, and shaped by the imagination into a focused beam of intention, a force is attracted to our aid that does far more for us than we could ever do by sheer willpower and hard work. It may seem even mystical at times, but I think this is only because we do not fully understand it.
I am sitting in an apartment near Manila as I write this. Nida and I are finally together. Obviously, we are both delighted to at long last be able to reach out to each other beyond the glass barrier of our computer monitors.
My next goal is to obtain a Fiance Visa to bring her with me back to the United States. This will take a few months to achieve, but we will do it. I intend to remain here and work my drop-shipping business until we can return together.
The faith and loyalty that Nida has demonstrated by waiting so long for me is at least as significant as what I have done to bring us together. Perhaps even more so because she has had no direct control over the process—only the power of her faith in me. I am grateful beyond words that God has enabled me to keep my promise to her.
Long after I have succeeded in my present effort, I will still be at least the person that I had to become in order to make it happen. That is what makes this ordeal a blessing in disguise. And this is just the beginning. What I have struggled to do in six and a half years, some people can do in a day—because of the way they think. And if they can do it, then anyone who learns to think as they think can do it.
Once we really get ourselves into a situation where failure is not an option, then it is just a matter of time before we will find all of the knowledge, resources, ability, and willpower necessary to succeed, and success is then the only possible outcome.
I do not want to over-dramatize this event by coming across like it is Grammy night, but there are a number of people who have helped Nida and I get together. I want to acknowledge them.
As is true in virtually every case of challenging achievement, I have had help along the way. I am thankful for that help.
I want to thank Allen, a brief acquaintance, who gave me the address to the Asian dating website where I first saw Nida's profile picture. Through that picture, I intuitively knew that I was looking into the eyes of a beautiful soul. I was right.
It is funny how a seemingly insignificant and random event can have such a profound effect on the lives of people.
Thanks to Henry Beeland for teaching me how to sell on eBay, and much thanks to Ronald M Perkins Jr. for patiently guiding me through the intricacies and evolutions of drop-shipping.
Thanks to Roger Langille for the online coaching seminars that he provided during his time with DSDomination.
Special thanks to my dear Sister, Joleen Barce for her unwavering faith in my ability to succeed in this endeavor, and for all the many ways she has both directly and indirectly helped Nida and I get this far along in the achievement of our mutual dream. She is truly a friend of our relationship.
Thanks to both George and Joleen Barce for all they did to provide me a supportive environment during the Winter and Spring of 2011. That incubation period was vital to the tangible changes that came later.
And thanks to Bob Martin for the ebooks and online information that opened doors to new streams of income for me and provided practical information that has assisted me in this endeavor to come to the Philippines.
If I have failed to acknowledge any person who has helped Nida and I come together, it is unintentional, and I thank you for your help.
