Make The Call! What’re You Waiting For?

August 18, 2003 was the first day of the rest of my life.

After years of wandering from meaningless job to meaningless job, I realized I wasn’t doing what I wanted with my life. I was bored, I was always tired, I knew there was something else out there. Then one of those career college commercials came on Peachtree TV (you know the ones, annoyed looking guy looking into the crowd yelling at you for not doing anything with yourself… “Get off the couch and make the call! What’re you waiting for?”), and I started to think about what else was out there for me.

I had plenty of sales experience, but in nothing significant. I know how to sell things, but I wanted to make a difference. Now… I’m building marketing strategies to get life-saving medicine and technology into the marketplace. I know it’s a bit of a stretch, but I feel like I’m contributing to some really life-saving stuff! A far step from the girl who was learning how to do corporate printer sales!

And it’s because I got off my %$& and did my MBA. I learned how to organize myself, how to run a marketing campaign. How to sell more than products, but how to sell an idea! How cool is that?

There were some pretty big bumps along the way, there’s no sugar-coating here. It was hard work, I worked during the day and did my readings, projects and papers whenever I had time. It definitely sounded better than doing night and weekend classes though—I can’t imagine not being home for dinner with my kids, sitting in class and trying to stay away instead. It wasn’t easy, but it was at least on my own time, on my own terms. I never had to take a day off work to get to a class, anyways! (Yeah, I’ve heard some horror stories, seriously).

All in all – I am where I am because I did something with myself. I didn’t figure out that I wanted to be leading sales and marketing strategies in the healthcare industry—that would have been flat-out psychic. But I figured out that I wanted to do something else, and the rest just kind of fell into place.

So to all of you who are where I was eight years ago, let me give you a piece of advice a wise man told me:

“Get off the couch and make the call! What’re you waiting for?”