My Entr'acte

I am a dreamer. I am also a planner. Both of these qualities about me occasionally keep me up at night and into the early hours of the morning. I dream to get out of student loan debt. I made the plan with my husband to create a budget so we could tell every dollar we earn where to go before we spend it. We are due to be student loan debt-free by the end of next year. I dream to own a house I love mortgage-free. Once we are out of student loan debt, we will save up for a down-payment on a new home. Then, we will work on paying it off. I dream to own my own gym debt-free. I am thinking I want to go for a franchise, however, because those tend to be cheaper and more popular. I dream to graduate with an MBA. I am currently in school and beginning that process. I want to own other businesses and help them to succeed. I dream to be a good mom. I home-school my kids so they spend a lot of time with me and we get to do a lot together. I dream to be cancer-free. I am on chemo and doing the bes...

This week I have been thinking about vision. My husband is under contract to purchase the optometry practice where we both currently work. He is an optometrist and he has wanted to own his own practice since he decided he wanted to become an optometrist. His father is an optometrist and an entrepreneur. He owns his own practice, and my husband has wanted to work with him ever since he knew he wanted to be an optometrist as well. He has been working with his father now for eight years, and we are to purchase the practice at the end of next year. Fighting cancer and dealing with everything that is involved with fighting cancer, we are not feeling comfortable with going into debt to purchase the practice. We do not feel comfortable with purchasing the practice if I am still fighting cancer by the time we are supposed to purchase. So, what does all of this have to do with vision? My husband and I do not really have a vision right now of what it is that we want to do with our lives-...

Life is full of challenges. I have had so many challenges in my life that they are impossible to count. The biggest challenges, of course, stand out more so than the everyday challenges, but I do not think that anyone gets through even one day without having a challenge to overcome. It matters how we react to these challenges that appear. Do we face them head-on and defeat the challenge and overcome or do we get upset and claim to be the victim of our situation--blaming others and even society for the personal challenges we face? In today's narcissistic culture, I have witnessed a lot more of the latter of that question than the former. I think that is why those who are able to overcome challenges are such heroes in society. Many of these heroes are heroic only to the small audience of people that they interact with, but audience size does not matter. The world is changed one person at a time. Challenges teach us. Without challenges in life and in business, there is no grow...