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It was as simple as a birthday present that showed me how to leave my dead-end job. It was a birthday present to me. From me.

That's right. The birthday gift I presented to myself last year opened up a whole new, delightfully exciting new career that is growing in leaps and bounds. It's so exciting that I find myself waking up during the wee hours of the morning, anxious and ready to get to work.

I'm not yet dirty-dog wealthy yet nor am I world famous. Those are not my aspirations. I want a career that involves exciting things to do that showcase my special gifts and talents. That offers me creative opportunities and intellectual engagement. Flexibility to live a healthy, happy life. A life that balances my career with my play, my family, and my community. That gets the bills paid comfortably. And offers a future ripe with more to come.

I've got all that. Today. And I've got it much, much sooner than imagined, even in my wildest dreams.

And I'm not some starry-eyed kid thinking I've got all the energy, drive, and chutzpah to take on the world. There's neither immaturity nor naivete guiding me. No Harvard graduate. No trust-fund baby and no supportive family to feed me. No savings account, no pension fund, no retirement benefits to keep the home fires burning.

No. I'm a baby-boomer enjoying - thriving! - in my third career. That's right. This is career number three. By this time in life, I've learned what works for me and what doesn't. I've played all the games and find them distasteful. I've bent until I've broken and I've denied the inevitable. For a long, long time.

So what happened? I knew what I wanted and thought I'd allow myself to try it on safely as a hobby job for a while. It only took three months and I'd ditched my mind-numbing, low-budget, dead-end job at the end of a long, expensive commute.

My new problem was that my spare-time hobby job was producing more income than my REAL job.

My job was dead but I was not. And I was tired of living half alive, mostly unhappy.

I just did it. I bet it all on myself.

I didn't do it because I'd planned it, mulled it over for a while, analyzed it to death, or because someone told me to do it. There was no business plan because I never expected it to become a business.

But here I am. I did have a lot of willingness behind me. Willingness to pay attention to what I actually do want. Really want. I stopped denying my own abilities, skills, dreams. Stopped putting more importance in someone else's business instead of my own.

I've given all the best of me away to employers past and always felt I was left holding the short end of the stick. While I hauled my boss's bonus checks to his bank.

Enough!

I just did it because it was the right thing to do. And it all started with a birthday present I gave to myself.

That birthday gift? A one-month membership to an online freelance job-finding service.

I've never looked back. My life, and my career, are no longer lived at the dead end. We (my job and me) are both alive and well, soaring to new exciting heights in every adventure-filled day.

And I can hardly wait to see what excitement my next birthday will bring!

Learn more about this author, Sandy Hemphill.
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