Are you tired of taking detours on your road to financial prosperity? Paul James (@hellopauljames), author of Reverse Engineer Your Future, knows that waiting around for a lucky break is a waste of time. He believes you have the ability to set your own path if you can think differently.
Listen in to Paul to learn:
Why selling yourself is just as important as selling the products and services you offer
How to turn a rejected sale into an opportunity
What it takes to build lasting, value-based relationships that lead to sales success
Get Paul’s new book Reverse Engineer Your Future on Amazon.
Find out more at PaulJames.com.
Paul James: When I was going to school full time to become a nurse and working part time, I was driving to school in the middle of winter from my county, West Bend, all the way to Milwaukee county. It’s about a 40-minute drive.
I’m on the freeway, and they don’t plow the streets really well out here when it snows. They don’t put a lot of salt on the road. They were actually putting sand down right then.
All of a sudden I hit a patch of black ice and went spinning doing circles. I just remember the steering wheel going right and then going left, and I couldn’t grab control of it.
That kind of felt like my life at that time.
Things were spiraling in different directions. Eventually I went flying into the ditch and was kind of in shock. Thankful that I was alive, obviously, and in shock and not knowing what to do.
I can remember calling my mom up and asking her, “Should I call the police or do I try to drive out of here?” I called the police, she recommended I do that, and it took a while. No one ever came, and I eventually tried to just drive out of the ditch. The problem was that I was facing oncoming cars when I was trying to come out of the ditch.
I somehow managed to get the car out of the ditch. I’m back on the freeway and driving, and it hit me right there and then.
It felt like I was destined for more.
That I knew that life could be great and there were so many things that I could be doing that I had a passion for, and I just needed to figure it out. What I was doing then wasn’t what I was going to be doing five or ten years from that moment.
That’s what led me into the book and led me into the ideas inside of the book. People feel like they’re destined for more or they’re not happy where life is.
Sometimes it’s just not clear how we get there.
A Breakthrough in the Chaos
Charlie Hoehn: You mentioned that you felt like your whole life was spiraling out of control. What kind of things were going on?
Paul James: I was working at a heating and cooling company before this, and work got slow, which is what led me into nursing school in the first place. I needed a new career path. I chose that path because I was very interested in science and I liked helping people.
But I soon came to find out I didn’t like helping people that way.
But I liked helping people and thought it would be a good choice for me. I would be able to get a good paying job from it and come out of school and really hit the ground running.
Well, when I started school, the nursing shortage was big and people were hiring like crazy for it. When I was about to graduate, I had a couple of semesters left, and the job shortage wasn’t there anymore. It was hard to find a job, and if you could find one, it wasn’t paying nearly what it was when I had started the schooling process.
That whole situation was very devastating.
I had to move in to my brother’s garage because financially I was not doing well. I was kicking off a new marriage that way as well. Me and my wife were both in the garage, and that’s kind of how we started our marriage.
I kind of felt like a failure all the way around. I was trying and trying, but I felt like I wasn’t catching a break.
Charlie Hoehn: Where were you sleeping in the garage by the way?
Paul James: It was basically this big empty room, it was like a 12×10 room and there was no bathroom, no kitchen or anything like that. It wasn’t a typical garage where it had cars in it and stuff. He had remodeled it into what we call the clubhouse, a big empty room that had a pool table in the center of it.
My brother moved the pool table into his living room so that we could live there which was awesome of him. I’m very grateful for that.
But at the same time, it was not a practical place to live. We had two pets and were starting off a marriage in the cold Wisconsin winter. We were running through the snow to use the bathroom in his house, which was not fun at all.
Charlie Hoehn: When was your breakthrough moment and how long did it take to get there?
Paul James: My breakthrough moment was pulling the car out of the ditch and driving.
I need to figure something out. I need to figure out what I want to do with my life.
How could I leverage the struggles going on around me and pull out the positive things that came from them or that I learned from, then figure out what I want to be doing.
From that point, I went back home that night and got on the computer and started researching.
I had remembered some things that popped up from the past. Advertisement sites, different courses, things that I knew of.
I stumbled upon search engine optimization, which is the process of getting your website ranked on the first page of Google to get more traffic. So I started learning more and more about that. It led me to figuring out what I wanted to do, which was basically that: search engine optimization.
Finding Purpose in Passion
Charlie: Why did you want to do that?
Paul: I always had a passion for computers growing up. I can remember playing around on them, whether video games or trying to mess around learning how to code. One of my friends growing up, his parents were big into eBay. I remember seeing them listing stuff around the house, and he was learning how to program.
I always had that background and that influence around me. It piqued my curiosity. I just wasn’t sure, prior to this point, how I could actually use it to make a living.
Charlie Hoehn: How did that lead to the book?
Paul James: As I started getting going with things, I realized a pattern in my life with search engine optimization.
Prior to that, I was doing music and was in a band. That’s what led me to come across an ad that led to search engine optimization, because I was looking for ways to promote my band.
I’d realized I had this common trait that followed me through whether it was music, whether it was business. I was looking for a person or a moment that was going to shoot me into success. It was going to make me a ton of money, give me everything that I wanted.
As a musician, I’m thinking, “I should be out there hammering reps at record labels and explaining to them why they need to sign me.” I was trying to place my trust in that.
While I was in business, I was trying to find someone who was much more successful than me to convince them to give me a chance. After a while, I figured out that that mindset is just not a good one.
You can be your big break. You can be the person that is going to help you get there.
But you have to really realize that and use the struggles in your life.
Charlie Hoehn: What is the one thing you want readers to take away from your book?
Paul James: It’s never too late to change your mind. A lot of times, people don’t adapt.
I can remember a time when musicians relied on CD sales. Then we had, I think it was Napster that was like the first major file sharing site where people were downloading music. Musicians were no longer getting paid for the CDs that they sold, and everyone was kind of in a panic.
But some people were smart about it. They realized, hey, maybe we should just give music out for free and gain such a rapid fan base from the extra reach that we’re going to have 10-times the amount of people showing up at our concerts. Those people are going to be buying T-shirts and bracelets and merchandise.
Be ready to change course and adapt because things change. Those who adapt are going to be successful.
You don’t have to place your trust in someone else to do it. It’s all within you if you can just look at what’s going on and figure out an alternative.
Get Specific About Your Life
Charlie Hoehn: What would you say to somebody who is looking to reinvent themselves? What would you tell them to do this week?
Paul James: You really need to think about what it is you ultimately want. What it is you want to do with your life?
I figured out exactly what I wanted. Down to what kind of house I wanted to live in, what kind of car I wanted to drive. I went as far as to actually test drive cars and look at houses, even though I couldn’t afford them.
I wanted to be certain that this is what I want.
So I figured out how much it was going to take to be able to afford these things. Then I figured, is the lifestyle that I want to live? Does it match what it’s going to take to get that.
If you’re in a service based business and you’re selling websites, for example, if you want to make eight grand a month, you have to sell eight websites for a thousand dollars to hit that goal. Does that still suit the lifestyle? You have to figure out how bad you really want it.
Sometimes people have trouble figuring out what it is exactly they want.
An easy way to figure out what it is to figure out what you don’t want. Because it’s a lot easier to come up with that list first.
If we can figure out, I don’t want to be doing this, I want to be able to vacation in Florida for a month out of a year and this is going to inhibit me from doing that. Well then, you can get a lot closer to figuring out what it is you want by eliminating that stuff right out of the bat.
Charlie Hoehn: How would you suggest looking through that layer and discovering what you really want so you can reverse engineer your future?
Paul James: That was something that I really struggled with. I talked a lot about it in the book too. My wife and I found that we were often doing stuff to please other people, which at the end of the day, leaves no one happy. You’re not doing what you love and you’re going to have some sort of resentment towards that person.
When I dropped out of nursing school, I think there was a lot of disappointment in the family. Everyone was really proud of me for going and doing that, and then when I dropped out, everyone was questioning whether or not I was making the right decision.
But I had to trust my gut and go with what I felt was the right thing to do.
Ultimately, it proved to be the right choice and everyone came around at the end. I think everyone was really happy about that I made that decision in the end, including myself.
One really good way to figure out what you want to do is to go pick up new hobbies. You don’t have to do it forever. For example, I’m big into rock climbing.
When I got into rock climbing, I thought I would hate it. I only went because my nephew said, “Hey do you want to go rock climbing?” I thought it was a good opportunity to hang out with him, but I really enjoyed it.
If you don’t try new stuff and put yourself out there, you’re not going to actually figure it out. You are not going to find out what it is you like or don’t like. Go out there and try new things. Pick out the good parts of the things that you like.
Go with your gut instinct and pursue it, even if everyone is not on board right away. They will come around later.
Break it down into something more approachable something smaller that you can try. Then assess it after: “Did I actually like this? Did I want this? How did it make me feel?” You can become more self-aware and know what it is that you really want when it comes to bigger things as well. Everybody knows the phrase: do what you love and you’ll never work another day in your life.
Snowball Your Success
Charlie Hoehn: How did you find the courage to stuck up for what you wanted when you had all your family and friends pushing back on you?
Paul James: I was just so in tuned with it. I was finding myself after school every day reading everything I could about search engine optimization.
The first day, I remember what I did was I had ranked a blog on anatomy and physiology. It was a topic I was taking in nursing school at the time. I think in Google I didn’t hit that rate but in Bing I hit the first page.
While I was getting some traffic to it, I put some affiliate offers on the blog which at the time was a flash card offer. It allowed students who were taking that class to pull out these flashcards while they were in line at the grocery store or watching TV during commercials. It was a lot of memorization.
So every time someone came to my site and bought one of these flashcards made by a doctor, I got paid $20. I distinctly remember seeing my first $20 sale come in and thinking, “This is it.”
I know that this is possible. There’s opportunity here that is real and tangible now.
I’d sit in class refreshing to see if I got more sales. That was the moment when I said, “I am done with nursing school.” I went to a professor who was in charge of enrollments and said, “I am done with this. I am dropping out.”
And I still remember her saying, “If you do this, you can never enroll here again in the nursing program. This is it.”
It was a scary thing at the time, but I just knew.
It is a good tribute to small wins that add up when once you start to make that first initial success. And it just keeps snowballing. You just want to keep going and going and going.
Set small goals that you are able to meet. Once you hit that first goal, it is going to be addicting. You’re going to want to hit the next one and the next one and the next one.
It is not going to matter what anyone else thinks or says, because you’re going to see the end goal. You’re going to see the bigger picture.
Charlie Hoehn: Tell me a success story you’ve heard about somebody using this advice.
Paul James: Lamont used it. He was working at a bank before working together with me and applying this stuff. I actually talked him into doing SEO.
He had an interest for search engine optimization. He actually went and built a search engine optimization business, and within nine months he actually quit his job.
Just implementing the same strategies that I’ve been talking about in the book. He actually runs that business with his son now, who is using the money to pay for college. That’s a really inspiring story and something that I was really proud of.
Connect with Paul James and Reverse Engineer Your Future
Charlie Hoehn: What does the rest of this year look like for you?
Paul James: I’m actually growing my YouTube channel, which has been a lot of fun. I put out videos usually three or four times a week. They’re aimed towards people who are entrepreneurs or who want to be entrepreneurs. I have quite a wide audience from people who are younger and even people who are older as well and I just helped people with challenges that they face and kind of trying to figure out what it is they want to do.
Charlie Hoehn: What is a parting piece of advice you have for aspiring authors?
Paul James: You should definitely not overthink it. I have heard the quote before, “Take action, even if it is imperfect action.”
A lot of times people dwell on it and think about how the reader is going to receive it. I mean, that’s good, but you don’t want to dwell on it to the point that you never put it out.
Trust your gut instinct and just go out there and do it. Put it together. People need to hear what it is you have to say. There’s going to be people who ultimately love it and who are going to have their lives changed by it. Maybe there will be some people who don’t like what you put out, and that’s okay too.
For the most part, most people are going to love what you have to say and you’re going to find people who resonate with it. Don’t overthink it to the point where you never put it out. Don’t worry so much about what people think that you never do it.
Get Paul’s new book Reverse Engineer Your Future on Amazon.
Find out more at PaulJames.com.
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