108: Opening Up to New Opportunities with Aaron Patton

Welcome to the Careerfluencer podcast. This is Aaron Patton. I am a podcaster and I’m currently in the city of San Diego, California. There isn’t just a one path, there are multiple ways to do it, you consume things that’s going to help you get around people, either virtually or in person that wants you to do more wants you to go after your craziest goals ever, there’s a much higher chance that you’ll do that the saying that you are an average of the people you spend time with. That’s very true. Yeah, so when I was growing up as a kid, like, you know, we weren’t, we were just a regular middle-class family. My parents are very smart. They’re actually both valedictorians. So I always consider myself pretty book smart, I could get away with getting good grades without, you know, putting in as much effort as maybe some of the other kids. So that was nice, but I wouldn’t consider myself as much street smart, I just kind of followed the path of what they did. I didn’t really think about entrepreneurship, as I was going up, I just kind of I just took the next step, I just kept taking the next step of what was, quote, unquote, the acceptable route, what good kids do and their path. So school, college, getting the job like that’s, that’s the regular path, right? That’s what we’re all taught or didn’t actually to understand these days, that that’s not the only path that you have to take that path forward for a lot of people. And of course, there’s nothing wrong with that path. But if you’re a little bit different, if you want to do something a little bit different, understand that there are different paths out there, you know, self-education, online learning different paths that you can take to create the lifestyle you want. And we weren’t the richest family in the world, we weren’t the poorest family in the world, we were kind of right in the middle, we took vacations every now and then, like they’re great parents always supportive of what I wanted to do. But I just never was exposed to different ways of thinking, you know, I just kind of kept my head down or not keep my head down, but just kept going step by step, getting good grades, and just, you know, going the normal path and didn’t really give a thought to anything else. So you kind of have to sell yourself into a job. So I would just going on the job boards for our career, Counselor website, applying to every job under the sun, just trying to get something. And then aside from those, I didn’t even give thought to the location I applied for a bunch of companies, San Diego didn’t get any bites, because again, fresh out of college entry level hard, it was hard. But I did get my first job up in Washington DC, selling building materials, it was outside building materials, not an optimal product that I even knew anything about. But again, they gave me a phone, a car laptop, set me up for the decent starting salary. So I took it, but regardless, corporate came down one one day and came to the branch it was in Gainesville, Virginia, and they shut down the branch along with 150 other branches in the company, a company wide and I got to, I got to oversee a full shutdown of like a 30,000 square foot warehouse of building materials to absolute zero. So the requirement was that I helped manually shut down that warehouse, I remember like breaking a bunch of windows, throwing it in the dumpster. Like again, that was my first job sales outside building materials, not something I’d ever be not something that I thought I’d ever be selling, but it happened. And so I I shut it down, I got laid off. But in that I got a severance package. And again, I’d only been there for four months, there were people there for, you know, 3040 years that that was their last day when it was my last day when they came in, shut it down. You know, of course, they got much bigger severance packages than I but still, it’s like, you don’t really control your destiny when you’re working for someone else. Most of the time, I really just accepted it for what it was, I didn’t really give any thought to a long term future of my purpose, or what I truly wanted to do all I was really focused on, you know, young 20s, mid 20s just working, making money trying to make those sales during the day and then partying in the weekend like and just repeating weekend week out. And granted, I had a great, great time with our friends, we did a lot of cool stuff. We had a lot of fun. But I didn’t dedicate any time during the weeks to thinking about something long term, like, what would I want to be doing past like 30 or 40 or 50? Like, is this going to be the life for the rest of my life, or this is going to be my life for the rest of it. And I didn’t really have a moment of clarity until I lost that big sales deal at my last company here in San Diego. For me, once I really started to change my internal mindset, you know, going to my job, but instead of working, I was listening to you know, podcasts about online business or the future of the digital economy or different opportunities out there in the space like that’s when I truly started to make that shift. And once I put enough thoughts in my head like that, it my body eventually followed and I started doing and then once you start doing it’s kind Like a muscle build up, you start doing, you start doing, you start doing more, you start not caring as much about what people think about if you fail, you start not caring about the opinions of others as much, because there’s always going to be opinions and judgment, whether you do something or don’t do something. So once you start doing that, and getting in that routine, that’s when the magic starts happening. And that’s when it becomes more clear what you should be doing after you continuously take steps towards kind of that get greater calling, but just know that if you’re doing something that you don’t truly, truly care about, then you’re going to have that moment where you’re questioning things. And a lot of people just push through it, ignore that moment. And that’s why they become miserable later in life. And I really don’t want people to to be in that position. That’s why I try to have this podcast. Someone referenced – they’re really, they’re friends with Zig Ziglar his son and Zig Ziglar is a big self development guy, one of the originals the one of the Oh, geez. And he said, the most important thing for young people to understand is that what you consume and what you get put into your mind affects your life. It’s obvious, but a lot of people don’t think about it. So if you’re out there, like mindlessly scrolling through Instagram, or using social media, just for entertainment, or just to check up on friends and family. Well, that’s okay. You should also start to realize that you need to start consuming things to improve your mindset in your life because that’s how you actually make changes. Like it starts in your mind. Like it took me probably a year or two years of consuming podcasts and listening to different people, aside from just like my friends and family truly changed my mindset. It’s ok to think a little differently, try some different things that it’s okay to fail too.