Welcome to my corner of the Internet, thanks for stopping by!
Hi, my name is Chip Wilson and I am, first and foremost, a Husband and Father. In addition to these full-time jobs, I am a successful online entrepreneur who enjoys coaching like-minded individuals, aiding them in achieving their goals and dreams.
I believe that what you do for life is really more important than what you do for a living. If the two are mutually exclusive, not only will you be miserable, but you will never have the chance to realize your full potential.
Economic considerations influence 100% of our decisions in one way or another. The only way to mitigate that influence is to actively take control of our own personal economy. There are 2 basic ways to do this, and neither is right for everyone. You might choose to minimize the impact of the outside world and live a life of subsistence. Alternatively, you could embrace the abundance of opportunity in the modern world and become an entrepreneur, providing directly for your own financial needs through your efforts. I chose the second path.
Although I may know nothing about you, I do know that you have a unique purpose in this world, you deserve to be able to express it, and there is a way for you to do so while providing for yourself and those you love. If you also choose the path of entrepreneurship, I am committed to helping you reach your goals.
The content that I will share here on the topics of entrepreneurship, business, finances and personal development are all intended to help you pursue and profit from your life’s purpose and create a meaningful legacy by making a lasting positive impact on the lives of those who cross your path.
We live in a time unique in human history. Each of us as individuals has the opportunity to engage with OVER ONE AND A HALF BILLION other people in direct communication and commerce. That number is increasing every day. Whatever your passion, you have the chance to share it with more people than you could ever possibly meet, and in doing so not only realize your dreams, but aid others in realizing theirs. That is how you create a powerful legacy.
Our greatest legacies are the dreams we help others realize. By helping others realize their dreams, we make a lasting impact on our world which reaches far beyond our hands and the duration of our lives. Our legacies can be viral, influencing others well beyond the scope of the places that we have been and the people we’ve personally met. When you commit to “living for a living”, you may never know the full extent of your impact on others, but the rewards will be unfathomable!
What prompted all this…
A few years ago I had a rude awakening. Somewhere along my journey, I traded my dreams for a vision that seduced me with money, prestige and the trappings of wealth. Once I had started down that path, the apparent risk of changing my course obscured the actual and much greater risk involved with continuing it.
The Picture – I was earning a tremendous income and living a seemingly great life as an Investment Banker with a Harvard MBA. The Reality – I was deep in the red where it mattered most. I was renting my life, as well as the lives of my wife and sons, for much less than their true value. I had totally underestimated the cost of pursuing my career.
My Journey
Ready to take on the World
Before I go too much further, I’d like to share with you a little more the road that brought me to that place. I met Cindy at Dartmouth College. While there, she and I would talk about our dreams for the future. At that point, both of us knew we were headed to New York City to dive into the excitement of life in Manhattan and the world of Finance. At the same time, we also knew that our long term goals were to live in a place with a more relaxed pace of life, to raise a family, and to live a lifestyle that enabled us to be active participants in our children’s lives.
I used to tell her that by the time our kids got to middle school, I was going to be working from home, probably using the computer in some fashion, and spending the majority of my time coaching and being involved in their lives (something I missed in my youth). That was usually about the time she’d look at me and say “Sounds great. How are you going to swing that?” I didn’t know how, only that it would happen.
We were some of the first college students in the US to get the big, clunky Macs when they came out. The Internet existed mostly on green screens and the only people who really knew anything about it rarely emerged to see the sunlight. I had no concept of how things would change, only that they would and that I would tap into it somehow and leverage my time and energy to create the life of which we dreamed.
We left New Hampshire to take our first jobs in New York City. The path was predictable. We followed numerous friends and classmates to Manhattan, where most became bankers, paralegals or consultants, expecting to go back to graduate school after a couple of years. I loved the adrenaline in the industry and the City, completed my two year stint, and left NYC for Boston and the Harvard Business School.
“Where were we headed again?”
I received my MBA and continued my career as an investment banker. The work was hard and the hours were long – extremely long. I averaged 90+ hours per week consistently for the first 10 years. I had some great experiences. I was selected to spend six months as the Special Assistant to the Chairman of our firm and I helped start two new business units within the investment banking arm of the firm.
I was so busy that the conversations I’d had with Cindy and and dreams we’d had in college were lost in the fog. But the money was great from the beginning, and only got better – much better – the longer I stayed in the game. There was nothing to worry about.
I traveled all over the country, even outside the country – well over 100,000 miles a year for 6 years straight. The catch – I never knew when I would be traveling. Most often, trips were scheduled at a moment’s notice. One minute I’m on a conference call, and the next I’m headed home to pack for a week in LA or Seattle. I also spent a lot of time in hot spots like like Sioux Falls, Omaha, and Toledo. All in all, I saw much more of our great country than I did of my home town.
In many ways, the destinations didn’t matter. Most conference rooms and hotel rooms are pretty much the same. Often I only knew where I was after I figured out which day of the week it was.
Young Wilsons
Cindy was incredibly supportive. She enjoyed being a teacher and also the took care of all the day-to-day stuff at our house. After we’d been married two years, our first son was born. With his arrival, my wife stopped teaching and focused on raising our family.
Our second arrived in 30 months later. Cindy had her hands full, but she had always wanted a family so everything seemed in line. We could afford for her to do things with the boys and for all of them to go spend time with her folks on a regular basis. I tried hard to make sure the two of us could plan to do something special every few months – except that something work related usually came up which prevented us from acting on those plans. She never said a word. There would always be another chance.
“Good Morning Mr Wilson, this is your wake up call.”
There is a point when you realize that money is something that exists in abundance, and that the only thing truly finite is time – the time you have on this earth, the time you have to spend with those you love, and the time you have to do what is important to you.
I came home one day to pack up a couple of suits and get on another plane to the west coast and my wife was clearly upset. I asked her what was wrong, and she said to me, “I was never supposed to be a single parent.” It felt like my guts had been ripped out. It was a very long plane ride out west.
I was living according to a conventional formula for success: get a good education (check), find a good job (check) and work hard to generate and save money (check). Do this and my wife and boys would be well taken care of. At some point, I’d have enough put away to stop working and join them.
By 40, however, the reality was that I’d become an absentee husband and father – my family existed mostly as pictures in a wallet and voices on a handset. I had spent almost all my time and energy away from them, focused on other people’s priorities at the expense of everything that was important to me. The example I was setting for my boys, what my actions were teaching them about priorities and perspectives, was the wrong one. Even the value of hard work rings hollow when it’s only measured by the height of a stack of dollar bills.
“Sounds Great. How you gonna swing that?”
To set things right, I needed a new paradigm for my life, and to do that, I had to look inward first to my greatest motivation. I needed an alternative to the corporate world that was both economically sound and would create the freedom for me to take an active part of the lives of my wife and boys. Cindy reminded me of the conversations we used to have about working together, on our own schedule, and about both being involved in our children’s lives.
“What ever happened to using the computer to build a business? Remember when I asked you how you were going to do that?” Quite a lot had happened in the twenty years since Cindy challenged me on that the first time. The Internet had progressed from geeks staring at green screens in basement labs to a major part of everyday life reaching over 1.5 Billion users in homes, offices and on phones in 160 countries. It had become the largest single economic market for goods and services in the history of mankind, and its commercial potential is still in its infancy.
The amount of information to sift through was staggering. The opportunity was obvious, but the question was how to get my arms around it.
As I did my due diligence, I realized that even though people and companies had been making a lot of money on the Internet, much of online business was haphazard and even more of it was bogus. But a few people seemed to have figured out a way to build a legitimate, coherent online business model. At its heart were systems required to generate significant leverage and make outcomes predictable and duplicatible.
Their approach proved to be a sound way to create a viable business around any virtually product or service with sufficient demand. The systems and processes that they used to create their platform modeled those I had seen used by successful companies in case studies at Harvard, and when raising capital for world class corporations as an investment banker. In short, what they were doing made sense to me regardless of the fact that it utilized the Internet as a distribution channel.
My new Board of Directors
Working with and learning from the members of this elite community has been the key to finding my way back to the path that I first envisioned 22 years ago. I didn’t have to invent anything, nor did I invest in anything more than my own education and marketing efforts.
Today, I get to work with a handful of people in whom I’ve chosen to invest my time while the business I’ve created continues to build based on work I’ve already done . It doesn’t really even seem like work because all I do is help members of my team to achieve success the same way I have so they can realize their own goals and dreams.
The best part about it is that I now have a new Board of Directors. This dynamic group of individuals helps to establish my goals and monitors my performance. We hold board meetings at the lake in PA, and on the ski slopes in Utah. I get my performance reviews on the practice field, at lacrosse tournaments, or over a candlelight dinner. They are quick to keep me in line! The financial rewards are meaningful, but the time we share is priceless.
Let’s succeed together
The best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing. It’s not about toys or money. It’s about living the life of your dreams and helping others to do the same. Since I can only work directly with a small group of people at a time, I will use this page share with you and others many of the things I have learned which have been instrumental to my success. I’m always gaining new knowledge and insights as well, and will continue to share what I learn. I share this freely in the knowledge that it can help you find the success that you seek as well. I hope you will contribute to the community with your comments and that I can get to know you better through them. Together, the impact we can make in the world is truly remarkable.
It is the ultimate virtuous cycle.
To Your Legacy,
Chip Wilson
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P.P.S. If you would like to pursue anything you find here on a deeper level, feel free to contact me.
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