Finding Love in Unexpected Places: How Did Sean Come to Find Love, Writing, & the Sea?

And yet, then, in the next moment, he's dropped out of college.

He's opened up his own garage, working on cars.

All because, well, he got the news that he's about to have a child.

Fast forward a while, and Sean Donovan, he's back on top.

He's thriving as a successful real estate investor.

Again, he is living on top of the world.

And yet, then it's the 2008 recession and the floor drops out from under him.

He's lying on the floor of the gym bathroom.

He's broken in every form of the word.

Financially, physically, emotionally.

He's done.

And yet, from these devastating lows, Sean Donovan's story takes an inspiring turn.

A turn that makes this a comeback story that you, my friend, cannot afford to miss.

I've given you the highlights.

You, though, are about to discover the details, the full story, told by Sean Donovan himself.

So my friends, I'm excited to welcome you to what is episode 330.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah.

Are you ready to click this clip on like this bad days?

That's exactly what we do here at quick great inspiration.

SPEAKER_01: What's up and welcome back into another awesome interview here on Great Waste of Inspiration.

Today, I am blessed to be in the studio with a guy I have been so excited to get to talk to.

And that is none other than Mr.

Sean Donovan.

Sean, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_03: And Kevin, thank you so much for having me here today.

I am really looking forward to this.

And uh, you're such an inspiration to so many, and I'm just blessed to be a part of this process and uh this podcast with you.

SPEAKER_01: Oh man, well, well, thank you.

And uh, Sean, I'm excited to unpack this story that you've been on.

And I figure the best place to start is when you kind of look back at this journey you've been on, what do you feel like was that that moment, that experience that really kind of shifted everything that's ended up leading to where you are today?

SPEAKER_03: Two things come to mind, Kevin, without a doubt.

The birth of my daughter, which was very unexpected and unplanned, and it happened at an early age.

I was a 21-year-old father, and my daughter coming into this world changed the trajectory of my life.

I went from this fun-loving, partying, lifeguarding, bartending kind of guy to all of a sudden, whoops, I've got another human being that is counting on me and looking up to me for inspiration and guidance and financial support and all of those things.

So it that probably more than anything changed the trajectory of my life.

And you know, although it was unplanned, I call uh I call my daughter sometimes jokingly.

I call her, you know, my uh greatest mistake, you know, the biggest oatsie, but the most positive things have come out of that, uh, including an eight-year-old granddaughter that I have now.

So my my daughter is 28 and my granddaughter is eight, and and what a beautiful family we have, and you know, it all evolved out of an oopsie.

So sometimes those things happen.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: And I would say the second thing, the most probably pivotal moment of my life was 2008, and the uh real estate bubble bursting, and the financial situation that ensued from that really put me at a low point.

2008 was the worst year of my life.

Lost two businesses that I had poured a lot of blood, sweat, equity, and hard work and tears into over a 10-year period of time.

And I lost both businesses and found myself just you know struggling to figure out what was next and in the moment how I was going to survive.

But uh it really caused me to take a hard look at my life, what I was doing, how I was spending my time, and uh it caused me to make some drastic changes, including moving to Florida.

Yeah.

So a lot of a lot of positives came out of the toughest year of my life.

It's tough to make it through at that point, but uh the end result was a much happier, more fulfilled life.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Understandable.

Well, talking to the first point about finding out that you were having a child, where were you kind of at in life?

I mean, were you in, I think you were maybe in college at that point?

SPEAKER_03: I was, yeah.

I was a junior in college at Old Dominion University up in Norfolk, Virginia.

I was lifeguarding on the beach there at Virginia Beach during the summertime, and you know, working security and bartending and waiting tables and all those other odd jobs in between to help pay my way through school.

And yeah, I was just having a really good time.

I was in, I guess you could call full-on Playboy mode at that point in my life.

I was just, you know, it was all about having fun and you know, wasn't wasn't thinking a whole lot about the future.

It was I was just enjoying life to its fullest at the time.

And you know, I'm glad I had those experiences.

I got a lot of that out of my system at the time, but I was absolutely positively not in the mood uh to have a child.

Now I aspired to have a child one day.

That was a dream of mine, but I I just uh I didn't think it was gonna happen that way, and and certainly uh not under the circumstances I was in financially, and and and maybe with a different person as well would have been nice also, but you know, it is what it is, and uh we we made the best out of the situation.

I love my daughter to death, and but but she did change my life more than anything at that point.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah.

What I can't help but think of is that that quote that people say is that you know, life is what happens when we're busy making other plans.

And uh and I and I and I listened to you with with that, and I think, huh, that definitely rings true.

Now, career-wise, you talked about being in in real estate coming up in 2008.

What led to that?

I mean, you you said you were a junior in college.

What happened from there?

SPEAKER_03: Well, I had to drop out of college when I found out I was having a daughter.

That was that was the first thing that that had to happen.

And it was unfortunate.

I you know, really didn't have my heart and soul in college at the time anyway.

I thought I knew what I wanted to do when I went to college.

I wanted to be a mechanical engineer.

I quickly learned that math was not my forte, and I had to change my major over to environmental sciences, which I enjoyed learning about.

I had dreams of maybe traveling and studying rainforests and coral reefs and all these cool things and adventures in life, and then all of a sudden, ooh, now I got a daughter, and uh probably shouldn't be going all around the world, you know.

So this this major that I had switched into uh my sophomore year now became sort of irrelevant to me again.

I didn't have aspirations to become a doctor or anything like that.

I I always have more of an entrepreneurial mindset.

So I made the the tough decision, considering how much time, effort, energy, and money that I'd already put into college, to withdraw from college and start a business.

And I had really been into cars since I was a kid.

I tinkered with cars with my grandfather, and he was always taking apart a lawnmower or working on something mechanical.

So I thought, well, let me do something I love and you know figure it out.

So I had a 66 Mustang that I was halfway into restoring, and I my first car with Triumph Spitfire uh necessitated me becoming a good mechanic just to keep that thing on the road.

So I had gotten quite good at it.

So I said, let me try my hand at business.

I hadn't taken any business classes in college, unfortunately.

And so I made every mistake in the book starting uh what I called on-site auto service uh in Virginia Beach back in the mid-90s.

So made every mistake, you know, hired family members, hired friends to work for me, and uh, in spite of all of my mistakes, at the end of the day, I was financially successful with that business.

But I got uh burned out after a couple of years.

I was doing literally everything.

I had developed some trust issues because of experiences I had had with the wrong people I had hired.

So I was the guy that was crawling underneath the car in a parking lot changing the oil.

I was the guy doing the accounting and invoicing, I was the guy doing the sales.

Uh so I was wearing a lot of hats, and this working on cars thing that I had really loved started to become feeling a lot like a job and a chore.

So I made the decision to close that business down.

And it was tough.

My last month in business, yeah.

Keep in mind, I'm in my mid-20s.

I think I made about$7,000 that last month, and I just didn't have the foresight or the business acumen to think, well, why don't I sell this book of business that I've built up to a competitor?

Nope.

I just closed the doors one day and decided I don't want to do this anymore.

And then I went into a brief stint in corporate America and quickly realized I didn't want to do that either.

So I thought, okay, if I can restore a car, maybe I could renovate a house.

So with some of the money that I had made from the auto repair and auto restoration business, I bought my first condo, I did some restoration and improvement to it, and sold it a couple years later and made a pretty decent chunk of change for myself at that point in time.

It was certainly the largest chunk of money that I had made uh in my life up until that point.

And I thought, you know what, this is kind of nice.

So I went and got my real estate license and I started practicing real estate in 1998, and I had a 10-year plan that was supposed to culminate in 2008-2009.

Worked my butt off, Kevin, 16 hours a day, three or four years into real estate.

I had built up a little portfolio of investment properties I'd scrimped and saved and moved into a place and renovate it while I was living there.

So I lived 90 days without a kitchen one time.

I ate out a whole lot.

I lived in a house for 30 days with no bathroom.

And luckily I had a gym uh membership to a gym that was just a couple blocks away.

So I'd shower there and you know, do all my you know, bathroom kind of business at the gym uh in the interim while I was working on the house.

And then I'd flip the house and move out into another one, or I'd rent the house, etc.

So that's how I got into real estate and contracting.

And it was a learning curve for that as well.

I made a bunch of mistakes early on, cost myself a bunch of time and money, and uh I finally got everything on the right track.

The machine was running smoothly, so to speak.

I was hitting on all eight cylinders, I was making money, I was living a good life, and uh I was very busy, but at the same time, it was very rewarding financially.

And then out of the blue comes 2008.

Bam! Rug yanked right out from underneath me.

Uh, that was that was a very tough thing to face, and it happened at a very inopportune time for me as well.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.

Now, when 2008 happened, as far as I mean, you weren't only just a to be like realtor, but you had all these investment properties.

How did it end up happening for you?

As far as did did you have to sell those?

Did everything basically get taken?

I mean, what what exactly went down for you at that point?

SPEAKER_03: I was so ingrained in what I was doing.

I was renovating an old Victorian home that a partner and I had purchased.

I had a couple of renovation projects going on for clients at the same time.

Um, I was overseeing the management of 1,200 residential units in Richmond, Virginia.

Our rent roll ranged from$250 a month up to$3,500 a month.

So we were dealing with you know just a whole spectrum of renters and all different financial um situations in different walks of life.

I didn't see it coming for some reason.

I should have.

I didn't see the bubble busting.

You know, all the junk loans, the arm loans that the banks were making and stuff were just, you know, it was not on my radar.

I was doing my thing.

I was working with a lot of first-time home buyers and investors as well.

So I was working with people who were getting, you know, FHA loans, and I was working with investors that were paying cash and everybody in between, and I had my own thing going.

But uh I was uh in the middle of this Victorian renovation, I had put a lot of my own cash into it, and uh I had a lunch meeting with my banker.

We were getting close to the point where we're gonna refinance the property, pull some of our own money out, get ready to list it for sale and move on.

My banker comes to the lunch meeting and he looks rough.

And this was a guy who was usually well put together.

So he looked like he hadn't slept in days and he just didn't look like himself.

I thought he was sick or maybe he was going through some personal stuff at home.

And uh before we had even ordered lunch, he proceeds to tell me that he can't do the refinance.

And at the time I had an 800-plus credit score, and I've done multiple loans with this bank and him.

And I said, Well, why not?

You know, what did I what's wrong?

What did I do?

So it's not you, it's it's uh the bank has just made a decision that we're not gonna do any of these investment refines anymore.

And I said, Well, that's your bread and butter, and he said, and that, my friend, is why I haven't slept in the last week.

So that was my first indication that something major was going on and about to happen, and it happened quickly.

And um, you know, the transition for me was extremely tough.

I had been living a pretty good life up until that point.

I've been working very, very hard, but I had been enjoying the spoils of my labor.

And uh it stopped very, very abruptly.

I went from making a whole bunch of money uh to making no money in a very short period of time.

And to compound things, a lot of my renters, some of which who had been with me for years in personal investment properties that I own, they found themselves in a position where they couldn't pay rent.

Um, you know, my employees who were working for me in the contracting company, you know, I was still paying them.

And uh, but their wives or their spouses had gotten laid off.

And now they were in a different financial position looking at me for overtime and things that I just wasn't able to give them at the time.

So it was a very rapid onset of change, and it was extremely painful.

You know, I think back and I reflect back now, a lot of the tenants that uh rented from me and a lot of the investors, you know, they they uh either worked at or owned a lot of the restaurants in Richmond, Virginia.

I used to always get an invite to go to openings of these restaurants, and you know, I was on a guest list sometimes for special events at the museum, which I was a member of and different things, and and all of a sudden, all of that went away.

And uh I went from not looking at prices on things in the grocery store to shopping so frugally.

I mean, at one point uh things got so bad I was living off of an avocado and a mango and water every day.

So man, what an adjustment that was, Kevin.

Yeah, I know some people are thinking, uh, poor Sean, you know, blah, blah, blah.

But you know, it's it's it's easy to say until it happens to you.

And it happened to me, and I was cautious.

I had savings, I had, you know, contingency plans in place, and it was amazing how fast all of it came unraveled.

I had$120,000 sitting in a reserve fund for maintenance issues uh on properties that and I watched it evaporate in one year.

It was unbelievable.

So what that taught me was the that even sometimes when you think you're prepared, you can never underestimate what can be dealt your way in a very short period of time.

So that taught me to have contingency plans for my contingency plans to have not just a plan A and a B, but uh plans A through Z.

SPEAKER_01: Wow, how rough.

Now, out of my own curiosity, kind of what was that kind of ground zero moment during this time, like the lowest of the lows that maybe sometimes it seems like we have to hit rock bottom and then maybe even find a floor below it before things can kind of start to change for us.

SPEAKER_03: Well, it's funny that you said rock bottom and a floor below it, because that that definitely brings up a story, and I think this was rock bottom for me.

I had been dealing with a lot of the stress from the financial uh burden that was put on me in 2008 by going to the gym and working out.

I mean, I was working 12 to 16 hours a day, six days a week, and a half a day on Sunday, and uh, you know, I was finding time somehow, even if it was nine, ten, eleven o'clock at night to squeeze in some gym time.

And I was doing that six days a week as well, just to blow off the steam.

And one night I was in the gym doing my normal workout, and uh I was wasn't feeling that great, but I pushed through, I had a good workout anyway.

I got into the sauna, which I always ended all my workout sessions with the sauna.

I'd go in, do a little bit of meditation, yoga, stretching, etc., get some of that detox going.

And in the sauna, I started feeling really dizzy.

I got tunnel vision, my ears started ringing.

I was the only one in the locker room, it was late at night, the gym was about to close.

I had the wherewithal and luckily the ability to get out of the 140-degree sauna, and I literally remember crawling across the tile floor of the gym over to the shower, and um in the floor of the shower, which I always wore flip-flops in the shower just because you know, a little OCD about germs and you know, the gym floor.

But here I am sitting on the floor, I got the cold, the shower on the coldest water I could possibly get, just running over me to cool me down.

And I thought I was having a little bit of heat exhaustion.

So I remember that very, very well.

It was a vivid memory for me.

I remember getting up out of the shower after I'd cooled down.

I remember the gym worker vacuuming the locker room, kind of waiting for me to leave.

I remember walking out of the gym to my truck.

What I don't remember is driving home.

My house is about three miles away from the gym.

So the next thing I remember was waking up in the floor, uh hardwood floor of my house in a very uncomfortable position.

The dogs were in the next room, whining and pawing at the door to get to me.

And I uh I woke up and I could hear my heartbeat beating in my eardrums.

I just felt terrible.

I felt like I had the worst hangover of my life.

Hadn't drank anything in days.

I mean, I you know, I didn't have money for alcohol at that time, so there was nothing like that going on.

And I thought, oh my god, first of all, how did I get home?

Secondly, did I have a heart attack, a stroke?

What is wrong with me?

So I managed to get up out of the floor and I look out the back of my house, and the garage door is wide open.

And I lived in an area in Richmond, it's a nice area.

I was living in my home office at the time.

I was fastidious about closing the garage door even for a minute.

I'd had a bike stolen, had some tools stolen out of the garage in broad daylight.

It's downtown in the middle of the city.

And here I am, middle of the night, the garage door is wide open, and somehow I got my truck in the garage perfectly straight without getting anything.

And I know that I on under normal circumstances would have not left that door open for a minute, but it was probably open for about four hours or so.

So I let the dogs out and I just took a long walk and I had to calm my nerves down.

I got back, I sat on the couch, I watched the sunrise on the window, and I thought, man, like this this is it.

This is my second chance.

This is my wake-up call, and this is my second chance.

Like, I don't know how I made it home, especially safely, but I just I thought right then and there, if I don't do something, if I don't change the course that I'm on, this train's about to hit a brick wall.

And I might not be around one day to see my daughter get married or to see a grandbaby or to get married myself.

And uh decided right then and there I made a firm promise to myself that I was going to make some drastic changes in my life.

So that was the most pivotal moment.

That was the rock bottom moment.

That kind of pulled me into some change.

Oh, and by the way, I didn't even mention at the time I was going through the absolute worst breakup of my life.

So I'm going through this struggle financially with my businesses that I've had for 10 years.

At the same time, I've got a broken heart, and I'm trying to weather the storm pretty much on my own.

So that was that was the low point.

But I said, you know what, there's better things out there for me.

I've gotten as far as I've gotten in life.

I can do it again, even if it means starting over.

So I made some commitments to myself and made some drastic changes from that day forward.

SPEAKER_01: Wow, that is really powerful.

From that point forward, what would you decide to do?

What did you have a plan in place as far as what you were going to do next and second and third?

Or did it kind of just come as it went?

SPEAKER_03: I wish, Kevin, I wish I did.

I was so ingrained in finishing the projects that I had on the table, somehow making payroll on Friday, getting the bills paid.

I was in survival mode.

I didn't know what was next.

Next for me was like, okay, I gotta make this call, I've got to, you know, go to this job, I've got to, you know, buy this material.

I've got I wasn't in a position where I could step back and look at the big picture.

But fortunately, I knew someone who could help me with this.

I had had a business consultant who had sort of become a life coach back when things were going good.

I had a different set of problems.

I had the money, um, I didn't have the time.

So organization, focus, strategies, systemization, all that was very important to me.

And uh I had this wonderful life coach, business consultant, who had helped me uh streamline my business, get on track, and she attributed to a lot of the success in the business.

So I find myself now having to humble myself and call her and ask her for help.

And I was not in a position at the time to afford to pay her anything.

And she graciously stepped up and helped me out of the kindness of her heart.

unknown: And she came over and sat down across from me.

SPEAKER_03: And you know, I hadn't had a session with her in a little while now.

I had been off and running on business, everything had been good, and you know, we we didn't have regular contact like our weekly meetings we used to have.

So she engages with me now, and and she's sitting there across the desk and she's just looking at me, and I'm a very different person than I was when she had left me in a good position, you know, a year or two prior.

And we talked about things out of control that happens, like a global economy.

I didn't do that.

I was running my business as usual, I didn't make any mistakes, and it was just very hard for me to grapple with that these things out of my control were happening.

And she drew a circle on a piece of paper in front of me and put a bunch of dots in it, and then she put a bunch of dots outside of the circle and she said, What is this?

I said, I have no idea.

It looks like a planet with some moon, stars around it, whatever.

She goes, No, this is you, the circle, and everything inside the circle is what you can control.

Everything out the side of the circle is is out of your control.

So let's focus on what you can control, what you can do.

And I said, Yeah, but and then she said, I don't like hearing these yabits.

She gave me, there's no yabits here, they're not allowed.

She said, We're gonna we're gonna have some really heart-to-heart talk right now.

We're gonna get to the brass tacks of things.

And she asked me, well, first, and this is crazy.

I had these stacks of bills on my desk and stacks of proposals and estimates and all these things on my desk.

And I was distracted by them, admittedly.

And here she is sitting across from me, giving me her time, which you know, I had once paid her, you know, I think around $120 an hour for, and she's here giving it to me for free.

And she could tell I was distracted.

And she stood up, took her hand in one fell swoop, and swiped all these folders and estimates and proposals off my desk.

They went flying, and I almost had a heart attack.

I mean, my OCD went through the roof, and I'm like, what are you doing, crazy woman?

She goes, Sean, she goes, stand up, look me in the eye.

She goes, forget about that mess, forget about those bills, forget about those proposals, forget about it all.

Look at me in the eye right now and tell me, if none of that existed, if none of that mattered, what would you do with your life right now?

Where would you be?

Who would you be with?

What would you be doing?

And I said, uh uh, well, I I would be somewhere uh sunny and warm with palm trees, uh hopefully close to an ocean, sailboats.

I would be close to my daughter who had moved to Florida a few years prior.

And um she she grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me.

And she goes, Sean, you live once.

She goes, Don't wait until it's too late, do it now.

And then she pointed to a license plate that was hanging on my wall right next to my desk that said U L-I-V-1SE.

Personalized license plates were very popular in Virginia, and uh that license plate said you live once.

And it was on a uh car that was very special to me.

It was a 2003 Mustang Cobra.

It's my baby.

I had to sell that car, it was a chip that I had to cash in in 2008 just to make payroll.

And it was very painful, but at the same time, it was just a car.

Told myself I'd replace it one day.

And when she pointed to that license plate, I thought, wow, here it is, right in my face, you know, been there all the time, sitting right next to my desk.

You live once.

Like if today was your last day, if this was your last shot, what would you really be doing?

Like, how would you be spending your life in a meaningful way?

What would you be doing with your time?

Who would you surround yourself with?

And that reflection caused this ripple effect in my mind.

And you know, to be honest, that burnout effect that I had experienced in my first business with mobile auto repair and auto restoration, it did crept back up on me over the last 10 years that I had been in real estate and contracting.

You know, I was making great money.

Uh, it was very rewarding to renovate an old property, and and you know, the residual income off of rentals was nice.

I just I built a nice little enterprise for myself there, but was I happy?

Not really.

Uh, my time wasn't my own count.

I was spending all my time uh making other people's schedules and other people's plans and and apologizing for shortcomings of contractors and and this and that, and trying to solve other people's problems, and it just was not resonating with my soul anymore.

So uh my life coach that day really snapped me into a different mindset.

I said, Yep, you know what?

It this is not just some pie in the sky.

Oh, what if something happened?

What if I wasn't here tomorrow?

No, my brain kept going back to that moment in the floor that night after the gym, and how thankful I was to be sitting there and how thankful I was to have this conversation and have this opportunity and have this potential for the future that could have easily been taken away from me in that moment.

So that's uh does that answer your question in a very roundabout, long form way?

SPEAKER_01: No, I mean, dude, what a powerful story.

I mean, when you when you were talking about her swiping off everything on your desk, I mean, literally, I got goosebumps because Yeah, I mean I got angry first, and then I got goosebumps, and then I got the realization of, yeah, and you know what, she's right.

SPEAKER_03: Screw all those folders.

It doesn't matter.

My health, my time, my life, my future, my family, all of those things uh needed to be at the forefront of my mind in that moment.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.

Well, well, let's first acknowledge, give it up to the life coaches, and uh absolutely yeah, that is so amazing.

So at that point, you only live once, but you still have this business, even if it's it's drowning.

What do you do at that point to start making moves?

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I wrote down some commitments on paper during that life coaching session and after.

I I set some new goals and expectations for myself.

You know, my my priorities shifted from well, we gotta finish this project so we can pay these bills to this, do this, that, and the other.

And I looked at the big picture where I wanted to be, and it was very hard, Kevin, because I was deep down in the hole.

You know, they say when you're in the hole, you know, you gotta step out of that hole somehow, but you somehow you can't even see the top of it.

You're so deep sometimes.

And then they say, well, think outside the box.

Well, thinking outside the box is great, but what if the instructions on how to get out of the box are on the outside of the box and you're boxed into the box?

So having that life coach, having the outside perspective gave me some clues and some immediate directions and steps I could take to get out of that hole I was in, to get out of that uh stressed, depressed, uh just struggle mindset.

So, and I'm a big proponent and fan of Tony Robbins.

I've been to his seminars in the past, read his books, lots of self-help books, Jim Rohn, John Alexander, all those uh John Maxwell, all those uh famous, you know, gurus.

I've been following them all through business.

But now when I needed to follow the advice the most, for some reason I just found myself so deep in the hole, so deep into survival mode that I couldn't.

So I I I envisioned the end result.

I wrote down what it was gonna look like and feel like.

Just like, you know, when when she grabbed me and shook me by the shoulders and she said, you know, where would you be right now?

Don't think, just tell me.

So I made my goal, like, okay, I'm gonna move somewhere where it's not cold half of the year.

I want to be close to my daughter.

She was in Florida, that kind of made sense.

So I said, all right, you know, I had come to Florida and visited her over the previous several years, and I really liked it here, and I'd envisioned buying a winter home one here one year uh in the future.

But, you know, I didn't know how in the world I was gonna do it.

I mean, I couldn't pay my gas bill at that time.

I was taking cold showers, so to think, oh, let me just pack up and move to Florida.

Yeah, that sounded outlandish, but you know, the outlandish thing was to continue on the same path I was on.

unknown: You know, what do they say?

SPEAKER_03: The definition of insanity is to continue doing the same thing the same way and expect different results.

So I had to think completely different.

I had to think big.

I had to put myself, my mindset into Florida.

So now I'm thinking, okay, I want to move to Florida, I want to be close to my daughter.

You know, I want to own a sailboat one day.

Well, where's the most sailboats in the east coast of the U.S.?

It's in Florida.

You know, warm weather year-round.

All these things that I wanted were not where I was living.

I wanted control of my time.

Yeah, I wrote that down.

I didn't want to have to worry about employees.

I wrote that down.

So sometimes I discovered through this exercise that it's equally as important to identify the things that you no longer wish to have in your life.

And by doing that, sometimes it opens up your eyes to new possibilities and things that you didn't know that you could have in your life.

So I had a list of all the stuff I wanted.

I listed all the things that I no longer wanted to do, and then I started to really study and think about this list constantly.

I would take walks, I would just noodle on the possibilities of what if somehow I could get out of the hole I'm in and get to Florida.

How would that feel?

How would that, you know, vibe with my soul?

Like what differences could I make on a different level?

And then I started to reverse engineer it and come up with a step-by-step plan, not just to get to payroll on Friday, would get way beyond that.

Payroll was just one little you know grain of sand along the path of this big picture that I was now thinking about and creating in my life.

So I had to make some very tough decisions.

I sat my father down, I had lunch with him every week, and you know, he knew I was going through it.

And I told him that I was planning on moving to Florida, and he just about jumped out of his seat and strangled me.

He said, You worked so hard for everything you've done.

You know, you've got the highest level of certification you can get as a real estate broker.

You you're a class A contractor.

It's very difficult to get that license.

Please don't let it all go.

Don't move to another state where there's licenses are useless to you.

And I said, Dad, I appreciate your sentiments.

Thank you for sharing that.

But here's the thing if I don't do something drastic, those licenses aren't going to matter because stress might get the best of me and I might not be here tomorrow, you know?

So I said I have to think beyond that.

I have to think past the 10 years investment that I've already got in this, and I need to think about how I'm going to invest today for the next 10 years of my life.

And when I put it to him that way, there was a mutual understanding and agreement there that that was probably the right thing for me to do.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know, so many times the right thing to do is rarely ever the easy thing to do.

SPEAKER_03: So funny you said the right thing to do.

Oh, that's uh foreshadow what's coming here in this conversation shortly, I'm sure.

SPEAKER_01: Absolutely, absolutely.

I love it.

Um I just got it.

I just got it.

It took me a few.

Oh my goodness.

So fast forwarding a little bit, let's talk about it.

What when how first I'm kind of curious how long it then took before you had everything in place to pursue that dream.

SPEAKER_03: This life coaching session happened sometime in early April of 2019.

And I'm happy to say, after a whole lot of uncomfortable decisions and a whole lot of sacrifices and uh a whole lot of work, uh I moved to Florida on September 17th, 2019.

So I'm coming up on my, let's see, oh no, sorry, uh 2009.

I'm off by 10 years.

So I'm moved to Florida September 17th, 2009.

So I'm coming up on 15 years of living in Florida.

And uh when I moved to Florida, I had no idea what I was gonna do.

I had a list of what I didn't want to do, I had a list of my expectations for life, big picture goals, etc.

Had no idea how I was gonna get there.

So I thought, well, let me just tap into something that I enjoy doing and uh do that for a little while until I figure things out.

So I had some very introspective conversations with myself and started thinking about like what am I good at?

What do I really did enjoy doing?

What do I love?

And I realized I had been writing for fun, for hobby, for passion since essentially the third grade.

I had entered a young author's contest back in elementary school and won first place.

And it was just so cool for me back then.

I thought, oh man, it's it's awesome to be able to take these stories, these thoughts, these feelings and emotions out of my head and crystallize those words into some tangible medium on paper that I could then share with other people.

So I still have my third grade, uh, fourth and fifth grade young authors' books, you know, the construction paper and Elmer's blue covers that I made, and then the handwritten, hand-illustrated books and stories.

And uh I literally dug those out of storage and looked at them, and I thought, you know what?

Uh I've been journaling, especially when when I uh did find time to travel during those busy years.

I kept a journal when I traveled.

Didn't usually have time to journal on a daily basis because I was too busy with all the minutia of the business.

But I thought, you know, let me uh let me get back into this.

I had taken a trip years prior, back in '98, when I first got into real estate to Tahiti, and I had literally come up with this whole storyline for an epic adventure novel that I'd just been pecking away with at a little bit at a time over the last 10 years.

I thought, well, let me get back to writing, let me finish that book.

I had another book that I had been working on called Health and Happiness, and it was just a collection of notes from my own personal experiences of dealing with uh you know my own personal health.

I had become a vegetarian years and years ago, and um, you know, at first people had ridiculed me for that, and then people started being inquisitive, and then people started expressing uh issues uh, you know, with their health to me and asking how I managed not to have those problems.

So I had done research.

I had a health mentor who had shared a tremendous amount of his time and energy and knowledge with me, and I had taken very good notes.

And I had shared those notes with a friend of mine who was going through a health challenge, and she found them incredibly useful.

And she told me, Sean, you really need to put this into a book.

This would be great.

So when I moved to Florida, all of a sudden I had a lot of time on my hands.

I went from working 12 to 16 hours a day, six days a week, plus half a day on Sunday, to now I got nothing but time and sunshine, no money, but uh you know, I had a lot of time on my hands and a lot of desire.

So within three months of moving to Florida, I had finished writing and I had published Health and Happiness and Owner's Manual for the Mind and Body.

And I had also was well on my way to finishing and publishing the trip novel.

I as luck would have it, actually, I define luck as when chance meets opportunity, and you most importantly, you recognize it and take actions to capitalize on it.

So lucky steered me in the right direction here in Florida.

When I landed here, it was just as my life coach said.

She had told me, you know, right before I left, she said, Sean, maybe just maybe things weren't going right for you in your business in Richmond, Virginia, because it was not where you're supposed to be, you were not doing what you're supposed to do, you are not surrounded by the people you're supposed to be with.

She said, when you land in the right spot and the timing is right, all the right people, all the right opportunities are going to present themselves, and you're going to find yourself in a very different situation.

And that is what happened to me when I moved to Florida.

I got in a totally different mindset.

I started spending my time doing something I enjoyed, like writing.

I started going out to networking events and socializing and doing things on a low budget, granted, but doing things that I had not been doing previously in my business because I was either in survival mode or I was in high production mode.

So I met a few people, and one of the first people I met was a gentleman with a sailboat.

He was about 20 years older than me.

He had a sailboat that he wanted to take out, but he didn't have any crew.

And uh I got uh the honor, pleasure, and privilege of being a crewmate on his boat.

I got to do a bunch of sailing.

Turns out he was a business consultant as well.

So I got a lot of business advice, networking advice from him.

He introduced me to a lot of uh key players in our community here that I was brand new to.

And it was just, it opened the world, the doors of so many possibilities.

And it was so crazy how I got introduced to this gentleman with a sailboat.

It was because another new friend of mine had overheard me talking to somebody else about wanting to go sailing.

And he said, Hey, he goes, I heard you come about sailing.

Come over here, I want to introduce you to somebody.

And then the whole thing unfolded, and it was all because I was projecting into the future.

Now, here I am, I don't have two nickels to rub together.

I'm wondering what I'm gonna eat for dinner that night, and I'm talking about going off and sailing on some yacht, you know, crazy talk, right, Kevin?

I mean, come on, Sean, ground yourself.

Get your head out of your out of the clouds, get your feet on the ground, you know, deal with what's in front of you today.

No, I'm out there projecting to the world, I want to go sailing, I want to be a captain one day.

I'm gonna own a sailboat, somebody overhears it, and next thing I know, that very uh next weekend, I'm out on a sailboat, somebody else's boat, not mine.

So I never specified in my dreams necessarily it had to be my boat at the time.

I was happy as tech to be on somebody else's, and to be contributing in a meaningful way, you know, whether it was you know tying up a line, whether it was jumping the sail, or whether it was swabbing the deck, I just I felt useful because I've been in such a helpless stage in my business due to the economy, it was nice to be in a different mode now.

You know, I'm not too proud to swab a deck.

You know, I was happy to be on a boat at the time.

I was happy to be doing a mindless job that I had total control over.

And and it was just it was so liberating and it was so free, and it just felt so good.

And the more I wrote, the more I started to get in the flow of writing, the more I started to enjoy it.

So I thought I would just write a little bit until I uh found something else to do.

Well, turns out I found a couple of publishers of local magazines who were looking for content, and uh I got hired to do piecemeal articles and do some freelance writing for some magazines.

Um, next thing I know, I'm writing biographies and uh web copy for people.

My health and happiness book uh caused me to interact with um a very successful gentleman in here here in town who had made a fortune off of marketing, and he was looking to transition into something different.

Uh, youth athletics, coaching.

And character building type of stuff for young athletes.

So he found my book very fascinating.

He took a liking to me, took me under his wing, and gave me, shared with me some very valuable advice on launching and marketing and promoting the book.

And part of that advice was to put it into some sort of coaching program.

Give my book away for free.

You know, I had I'd been struggling to sell this newly published book, and I was making about$10 profit at a time selling this book.

And in my first year, I sold 1900 books, Kevin.

That was a very difficult way to make$19,000.

And it was a drop in the bucket.

I mean, that was my restaurant budget for the year in my former life, you know what I mean?

So not to not to sound not to brag, but I had made a lot of money.

I'd gone to making a very little bit of money.

And but the difference was I was so proud of that$19,000.

I mean, I you know, that was my payroll in a week back in Virginia for my contracting company.

But you know, I produced this book and it was an evergreen product, and now I can you know promote it to the people and be proud of it, et cetera, et cetera.

But this marketing genius here in town said, sure, put together something different to build you know more on that brand and to have a bigger opportunity for profit and uh bigger potential for future offerings.

So I took his advice and um followed it to the T.

And I ended up making a career out of writing.

I got into health and wellness coaching for a while, and I found myself now some of the best ways to pull yourself out of a low place is to help other people out of theirs.

So I was helping coaching people and using a lot of that life coaching expertise that I had gotten from my life coach in Virginia when times were good, and how she helped me through my tough times, I was able to help apply to other people.

So uh so that was kind of that that path how I got into writing full-time now for the last 15 years.

SPEAKER_01: Wow, you know what I love about this is it's almost like this amazing story of life was just waiting on you to make a choice.

You had been living your whole life in this one area of the world.

You'd been doing this one thing, chasing chasing money, and it was like the whole world was just waiting on you to finally make a choice.

And it's almost like you moved to Florida, and it it's it's like you opened a door to a whole new world where your perspectives on what matter changed.

Everything was just happening, relationships being built, things that you did enjoying, no longer focusing on the money, but really just on living.

SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.

You know, one of the things that I loved more than anything was traveling.

So back when I was in high production mode in real estate and contracting, I was earning money, you know, hand over fist, uh, and I wasn't able to fully enjoy it.

I wasn't able to break away and take a vacation for a week.

I mean, it was a month-long proposition for me to take a one-week vacation.

It was a week or two of prep for me before I left on vacation to make sure everybody had what they needed, that everybody knew what was going to happen, that there were contingency plans in place for unforeseen.

And then the whole time I was on vacation, Kevin, guess what I'm thinking about?

I'm not thinking about the poetries and the sunshine.

I'm wondering what's going on at home.

Is work getting done?

Is, you know, are my workers milking the payroll?

Are there problems at hand?

You know, I'm checking my email, I'm looking for text, all these things.

And then when I got back, then the reality hit me after vacation that, yeah, my fears were accurate.

You know, a lot of things went wrong and a lot of things didn't happen the way I would have liked for them.

So it was a couple of weeks of catch-up when I got home.

So it really took the enjoyment out of vacationing and traveling for me during that period of time.

I had created an enterprise for myself that was successful, but at the same time, it wasn't delivering me the quality of life that I wanted.

My time was not my own.

I didn't feel like I had freedom.

I would have had more freedom in a nine to five corporate job because I would have been able to quit at five o'clock and go home and turn it off, turn off the work, focus on family, focus on dating.

Yeah, I was single through this time, you know, and and part of the reason I think maybe I lost that relationship and went through that tough breakup in 2008 is because of all the time that I was investing in work and what I was not doing on the personal side of my relationships.

So, you know, I think at the time I was blaming her for leaving me because, oh, I'm not making the same amount of money.

I can't provide the same level of you know luxury and living.

And I kind of felt like maybe she left, you know, like a rat leaving a sinking ship kind of feeling.

But when I look back on it, it was it was a combination of a lot of things.

I changed as a person.

I probably was not a pleasant person to be around during the during that uh that hardship time.

And so, you know, looking back now, I yeah, I can't blame her for leaving.

I mean, she that was her big move.

Like I moved to Florida, she moved out of the relationship and and moved on.

And you know, we're cordial, we stay in touch from time to time now.

I don't have any hard feelings there, but man, it was it was just really tough at the time to go through it like that.

But um, but yeah, it it's it's a different life now, and and one where money is not the end goal.

I think money is a great tool.

It gives us the ability to have freedom, gives us the ability to do the things that we want in life, but it's not the end-all be-all.

So if you're focused just on making money, um, you're probably not gonna be real happy.

You know, they say money doesn't buy happiness.

Well, I disagree.

You know, if you're using money as a tool and you're using it correctly, it can buy a lot of happiness for you, provided that you allow it to, provided that you allow time in your life to do those things that you enjoy that that money can deliver for you.

You can't let the pursuit of money just consume you, and and you can't let the lack of money devastate you on the flip side of that coin either.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.

Back to Florida, I guess kind of more moving up into present day.

You tell me which came first, the boat or the wife.

SPEAKER_03: Oh, the wife, the the wife definitely came first.

You know, I started to I started to really envision what I was looking for in a partner.

And um I I got you know started dating again when I moved to Florida.

I met someone shortly after I moved here and got into a long relationship with them.

That relationship evolved and we grew in different directions and you know, it had an expiration date on it.

But I invested a lot of time and a lot of emotion into that relationship.

So, but I was much better equipped to leave that relationship and move on, having gone through what I went through in 2008.

So when I got out of that relationship, I thought, you know, I'm still not where I want to be as a person.

And I took squarely half the blame for the failure of that relationship.

You know, if I'm not the person that I want to be, then how can I be everything to somebody else?

You know, I was trying so hard to please this other person.

At the same time, I wasn't completely pleased with myself.

I was much happier than I was after 2008.

I had come a long way since then, but I still wasn't where I wanted to be.

So I thought, let me take some time for myself, let me focus on myself.

I don't want to date, I don't want to really meet anybody right now.

The timing is not right.

I'm gonna just, you know, lick my wounds, enjoy being single, and keep focusing on the things that are gonna move me forward.

And you know what's crazy, Kevin?

Right when I made that commitment to myself and said, nope, not gonna date, not gonna look for anybody, uh, someone found me.

Very unexpectedly.

It was a Christmas brunch that some mutual friends of me and my wife's had put on, and and they invited me to go.

And I just I wasn't, I don't know, wasn't feeling it, but I talked myself into going anyway.

I hadn't seen some of those friends in a while.

And so I show up to this brunch, and there sat my future wife.

I didn't even know it yet.

So she heard my voice, it got her attention.

We talked briefly, she gave me her card.

Uh we left brunch, we both ended up over at the Ocean Deck later on for karaoke with the same usual friends plus some others that had joined us.

And um, you know, we we talked very, very briefly that day.

Again, I'm not in the mindset that I want to date anybody.

I was actually splitting my time between Virginia and Florida at the time.

I got in a consulting gig up in Virginia, so I was going back and forth.

But you know what?

Sometimes those least expected things end up being some of the most important discoveries in our lives, and I just could not stop thinking about this girl.

So lo and behold, I uh a mutual friend of ours had, you know, kind of pushed and followed up with us and ended up connecting us, and we sort of did a long distance back and forth thing.

I was in Florida half a month and and Virginia half a month, and we saw each other when we could, and you know, we we kept it very casual at first, but she quickly became my best friend.

And um, she was an artist, and you know, I'm I I was considering myself an author at the time, so I thought, oh, the author and the artist.

She paints pictures with paintbrushes, I paint pictures with words.

You know, this could be a great match.

She's from Brazil, so there's a lot of culture there and exotic uh you knowness to her character.

And I thought, man, this is somebody that that I could see myself with long term.

So we started dating, we moved in together, and then uh she ended up proposing to me, Kevin, which is crazy.

I had my own plan to vote on her, but she's a very determined and uh very strong woman who knows exactly what she wanted, and she beat me to the punch, if you can believe that.

So uh we ended up, let's see, we got engaged on her birthday um back in uh November of 2019, and then we ended up getting married uh in the middle of COVID.

Uh, we got married October 10th, 2020, 1010, 2020.

So um I've enjoyed four wonderful years of marriage with her, and I plan to be with her till the day that I die, hopefully many, many decades from now.

But she's a wonderful woman.

She's uh uh an artist, she's from Brazil originally, as I said.

She owns a local art gallery here in Norman Beach, and she's just uh this really positive beacon of hope and positivity and love and and laughter and life, uh, all rolled into one person.

So I'm just blessed to have her in my life and I'm blessed to uh be able to live with her and work with her and renovate a house with her now together as well.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, wow.

What an amazing story.

Again, again, man.

I just go back to this idea of was life was just waiting for you to open a new door.

And it was, yeah.

And it's amazing to see what lied on the other side.

I mentioned a boat because sailing that's continued to be a love of yours, correct?

SPEAKER_03: Yeah.

Oh, I got off on that long tangent.

You asked me if the wife or the boat came first.

The wife came first.

I shared with her my dream of sailing.

I got to take her on some sail trips uh with me as a crewmate on my friend's boat that I had been sailing with for years since I met him when I first moved here.

So we got to go through the keys, we got to go through a bunch of different island chains in the Bahamas, and a bunch of local trips here as well, uh, in the intercoastal and around coastal Florida.

That was super cool.

So she fell in love with sailing and the idea of ultimately buying a sailboat as well.

So crazy story, too.

We there's a whole bunch of other side stories and nuances, but just for to make a very long story short, as a result of COVID, we had a bunch of trips booked for 2020.

Deposits already paid, some of the trips were paid for.

My mom had owned a travel agency and she had passed away in 2018.

I had taken that business over.

We had plans to run it, you know, as a part-time business and incorporated into our other businesses.

Well, when all of those trips that we had booked got canceled, we found ourselves with a whole bunch of refunds from the cruise lines.

And so we had some newfound money that had come back to us, and we thought, you know what?

Our honeymoon cruise was one of those trips that got canceled, and we said, Well, this is not acceptable.

We're gonna have to do something about it.

And I said, Why don't we take this money, put as a down payment on a boat, maybe try to buy a boat outright if we can afford it, and make our own honeymoon, make our own travel plans.

So we started looking around, we started shopping.

It was right before all the boat prices and everything, car prices went through the roof due to COVID and uh shortages.

But we found a boat we loved, it was in our budget, and we pulled the trigger and bought it.

And we ended up, instead of going on a one-week cruise for our honeymoon cannon, we ended up having a 30-day cruise from Daytona Beach all the way down through the Keys.

We're able to rotate our own friends and his crew.

So we had a rotational crew of friends on our honeymoon sail.

And uh since then, we've sailed all over last year.

I went sailed from Daytona Beach all the way up the coast into Virginia, sailed up the Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore, sailed up the James River, past Jamestown and Williamsburg, all the way up to Richmond, where I'm from, and hit about 32 different ports along the way.

Also had a rotational crew of friends.

So we just we've had a blast, and that's developed into a little bit of a business.

We lost the travel agency as a result of COVID, unfortunately.

So we we decided, well, let's let's try to keep it going in some way.

Let's make the boat profitable so that it pays for itself and it's not just a liability.

So we've started doing day charters and weekend charters here locally in Florida.

St.

Augustine is one of our favorite runs from Daytona to St.

Augustine.

We also get down to Coco and O'Galley and sometimes incorporate a rocket launch or something into that uh trip as well.

So we've had um really just uh an excellent opportunity with the sailboat to do what we love and also incorporate uh a business plan into it as well.

And we get to pick and choose who we bring on as crew, who we take on as paying passengers, and uh you know how we spend our time.

And it that's that's just a wonderful thing.

SPEAKER_01: Wow.

How amazing.

How amazing.

SPEAKER_03: Now guess what I do while I'm sailing all the time.

What I write.

Every single day I write, I keep a really detailed captain's log and journal while I'm writing or while I'm sailing.

So every single day I write, you know, where we're at, what the weather conditions were, where we're headed, any issues with the boat, and who was on board, etc.

So it's kind of what you're supposed to do as a licensed captain anyway, and then I take it a few steps further and I add in a bunch of detail.

And I think to myself, this is something I'd love to share with your listeners here.

What if you had written one sentence every single day for let's say the last 10 years of your life?

I guess 365 times you know, 10, that's 3,650 sentences that you would have about every single day.

And this is exercise that can happen really quickly.

Hey, today it rained, I didn't leave the house at all, and I wrote six pages in such and such a book.

Or today I went to the grocery store and found a great deal on shampoo or whatever it is.

You know, to be able to go back.

I love reading my uh captain's law, my sailing journals.

It's really, really cool.

You know, it's one thing to look at pictures, those are phenomenal too.

A picture, you know, says a thousand words, but when you've actually written about some stuff and how you're feeling and maybe stuff that you didn't capture in pictures, that is super exciting to be able to go back and read and to share with others.

Um, you know, my granddaughter is eight years old now, and I share some stories with her.

And one day I want her and her grandkids to go back and read Granddude's uh captain's logs and to experience what I experienced.

So I would challenge your readers to start journaling.

Just take you know, three minutes, five minutes, and write one sentence about your day-to-day.

And I guarantee you, at the end of the year, the end of the month, 10 years from now, whatever, you're gonna be so glad that you did this.

SPEAKER_01: Wow, what a powerful, powerful kind of uh mission we've given to all of us.

I love that idea so much.

SPEAKER_03: And it's that mindset, Kevin, it took me into my most profitable business I have right now.

You know, from the first two books I wrote, Health and Happiness and the Trip.

The more I shared these books with people, and you know, the trip was just pure entertainment.

It was an action adventure, epic epic adventure novel.

Uh health and happiness was you know more of a self-help, uh health and wellness book.

But the interesting thing is, no matter who I shared these books with, people would express interest in writing their own books.

And it was half the people that I talked to were shocked that I had written and published a book and they expressed interest.

Oh man, I've got a story.

Well, it made me realize hey, we all have stories.

You know, every day is a new chapter in our book of life.

So I started helping people share their stories.

I started helping other people write their books.

I'll never forget the first day I got the first copy of my very first book in my brand new mailbox here in Florida, and that was such a good feeling.

And I thought, well, I'll only experience this once.

You know, you only get to write and publish your first book one time.

But guess what?

Now I get to help other people write and publish their first books over and over and over again, and I get to share in their joy and excitement of receiving their first book.

So that has really just been super fulfilling to me.

You know, I get to work one-on-one with people and have in-depth discussions like you and I are having right now, like I've had with my life coach in the past.

You know, health and wellness coaching was great, but I really niched it down to helping other people tell their stories.

You know, part of being able to tell a good story and to really communicate effectively is to have your mind right.

A good way to have your mind right is to have your body right and to be in good health and to focus on those things that you can control.

All those little bitty steps, all those little bitty things that I did to dig and claw my way out of that deep hole that I was in back in 2008, it applies not only to fitness and losing weight and health and wellness and business and finances, but also writing a book.

It's a step-by-step.

Take it one day at a time, break it down into bite-sized pieces while still envisioning that end result.

So when I engage with a new author coaching client, one of the first things I ask them is, what does this book look like in your mind?

Describe it to me.

Yeah, is it uh is it a six by nine, a five by eight, is it a pocket-sized book?

Is it an eight and a half by eleven book?

Like, what's the size?

What colors do you see on the cover?

You know, what do you envision the title being?

Like, what are your expectations for the book and how are you going to feel when you accomplish those?

So, as an entrepreneur or an author coach, these are the kinds of questions that I asked to get the project rolling because I know it was this line of questioning that helped me through some very tough times and helped me recreate myself in this whole new career that I'm in right now.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so amazing.

Now, for anybody interested in possibly working with you or even finding the books you've written, or even maybe planning a trip to Ormond Beach in Florida and want to go sailing, is there any way that we can send them where they can learn more?

SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.

So I'm very active on Facebook.

My handle on Facebook, I'm author Sean Dawn.

A-U-T-H-O-R-S-E-A-N-D-O-N.

I have a website.

I actually have a few websites, but my uh my main website is shondon.com.

And that's s-d-a-n d-o-n dot com.

And you can find all kinds of information about my author services.

You can find links to my books on there as well.

Um, there's one book that's not on my website right now that I'm super excited about.

It has its own website.

It's called Deer Beer.

And uh Deer D-E-A-R-Beer.com.

So they can go there and learn more about the Deer Beer trilogy series as well.

So I'm really excited about that project and uh putting a lot of time, energy, and effort into promoting that right now as well.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I love it.

Well, I will be positive, man, that everything you just mentioned is all in the show notes for anybody uh interested in getting in touch with you and learning more.

Sean, I got one last question for you today to wrap things up.

Is um I know your granddaughter, she's a big part of your life.

She's, I think you said eight years old.

What do you what do you hope she remembers about you?

What do you hope is that that one takeaway when she thinks of you, when she's old, what does she remember?

SPEAKER_03: Man, that is a fantastic question.

And it's a very important question to me because my grandparents were so influential in my life.

I would like her to remember me as a man of my word.

I always did what I said I was gonna do.

And I think a lot of people have the uh the someday symptom where they're always gonna do something someday, someday, and that someday never comes.

But I want to be remembered as someone who did what they said they were going to do.

No matter how outlandish and crazy and ridiculous it sounds, you know, I want people to know, particularly my granddaughter, that anything is possible if you put your mind into it.

No matter how deep and dark the hole is, you know, if you say to yourself, I'm gonna get out of this, I'm gonna put myself in a better situation, it is possible.

It may take a ton of hard work and sacrifice and different levels of thinking and different actions, but it is possible.

And if you say you're gonna do it, do it.

You know, the I think the easiest person to let down is yourself, but the most important person to not let down is yourself.

Because if you have those expectations and if you have integrity and you're a do what you say you do kind of person, you'll find a way to make it happen, you'll find a way to succeed in spite of those outside circumstances that you don't have control over.

SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.

Sean, dude, it's been a pleasure.

SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much for being here for likewise, Evan, and thank you for everything that you're doing.

I love your podcast, I love your story.

You've been an inspiration to me as well as probably thousands, tens of thousands of other people who who followed you and listened to your podcast to keep up the good work, brother.

SPEAKER_01: Oh man, thank you so much, dude.

And for you listening today, my hope, as always, is that you've heard something today that doesn't just entertain you, but more so, maybe as you're looking at your own life, maybe from a new perspective.

Maybe you're in a place right now where you're not happy and you're thinking to yourself, wow, maybe I just need to be brave enough to open a new door, like Sean did, and see what awaits me on the other side.

I love it, I love it.

Until next time, this is a great waste of inspiration.

Get out there and enjoy the day.