Living an Authentic Life – Gabriel Draven, Summer Series Interviews
I love to try new things, don’t you? Once a week in July and August, I will take one of the interviews from my book, Tales of People Who Get It, and post it on the blog so that you may learn from some of the interviewees. This week we start off with Gabriel Draven. Although interviewees may be doing different things now, their words still hold the wisdom they did seven years ago. I am calling the eight interviews, the Summer Series Interviews.
In 2007, I published my book, Tales of People Who Get It, which is based on interviews with successful people. The Invisible Mentor blog was born of my book. Let’s take a step back in time to the fall of 2007, I had been thinking about ways to market Tales of People Who Get It and hoping for a burst of inspiration. While I was taking a walk in High Park in Toronto, it popped into my consciousness that Tales of People Who Get It was my Board of Invisible Mentors. What happened, without being aware of it, is that when I faced a problem, I would remember parts of interviews that I had conducted, and would know how to solve that problem. After conducting research, The Invisible Mentor blog was born, and five years later the concept of the invisible mentor has changed.
One of the reasons people say why they love Tales of People Who Get It is that the interviewees are ordinary people so they can see themselves in them. If the interviews resonate with you, consider purchasing your copy of Tales of People Who Get It because there are over 30 interviews included. Seven years later, I am a better writer, and there are things that I would do differently today with the book, but I took a chance to put my work out to the world!
~Challenge~
Gabriel Draven: My biggest business challenge was learning how to live authentically in the workplace. I spent 10 years in the corporate world in an environment that just didn’t suit me. By the time I was 35 years old, I am 40 now, I had spent 10 years in the workplace, and was in about the 95th percentile in terms of income. At the end of the day, I was asking myself what I had accomplished for the day, and I was getting madder and madder, and it was a real challenge to me to spend the next 30 years of my life doing work that doesn’t really make any kind of difference. The work didn’t feed my soul and I was working with people who I didn’t have anything in common with. How do I actually begin to live authentically and make a living authentically? This was the biggest challenge that I have ever faced. And, quite frankly, I got laid off one day when the dotcom implosion happened and I said well I can find another job, in which case I’ll be in the same position that I am in now, or I can use this as an opportunity to springboard into going independent and do my own thing.
I decided to use my layoff as an opportunity to do my own thing. I am still in that process right now. It was really tough to make the transition from working for someone and being unhappy, to becoming an independent and living authentically.
~Resolution~
Gabriel Draven: How did I do it? I just did it. I threw all my money at it; I threw all my work and effort at it. Over a period of 4 years, it began to work its way out. Essentially, it was a 4-year transition.
~Secondary Challenge~
Gabriel Draven: When the dotcom implosion occurred, I decided that I would do consulting work in the technology field and use it as a stepping-stone to do more. First, all my clients lost their businesses. My contacts were on the eastern seaboard of the United States and then September 11th happened. The entire regional economy that I was targeting basically imploded. There was a trillion dollar meltdown in the stock market, you had 9/11 happen and what you saw was the first downturn in the consulting sector since the 1970s. All this happened the same month I decided to become an independent consultant. I tried to take a few corrective courses of action, but again, most of my contacts were on the eastern seaboard of the United States. I was working in Connecticut and living in Toronto. The industry, which I operated in, was decimated.
All these factors contributed to the transition taking so long.
~Resolution~
Gabriel Draven: I had the courage of my convictions. I have talent, a very good track record, and I recognized that it was a matter of just going out there and do it. I have worked in companies, and around the water cooler, I would get together with people who hated their jobs and they would say, “One day I am going to leave.” One person wanted to open a clothing store, and another wanted to open a flower shop. I worked with entire floors of people who were completely disengaged from their jobs and wanted to do something else with their lives. Five years later they are still doing the same things.
To me, there wasn’t so much a grand strategy, but pure brute force. I had to leave. I didn’t want to be saying four years later that I “shoulda” or “coulda.” I decided to just do it. I am very good at strategy. I graduated very high in my class in my MBA program. I was co-awarded Schulich School of Business’ top award for strategy studies in 2001. Though I am good at strategy, there comes a time where you have to pull the trigger.
~Lessons Learned~
Gabriel Draven:
- If you want to make it happen, just go out and do it.
- You have to be prepared to bet the farm and if you’re not prepared to bet the farm, do not play this game.
~How to Integrate Your Personal and Professional Life~
Gabriel Draven: It took me about five years to figure this out. I have a solid 10 years of corporate experience in brand management, but I was also very involved in environmental politics, so it took me a number of years to figure out how to marry these two things. I am now launching a renewable energy financing company. As we are seeing energy prices increase, I have figured out a business model to sell, rent and lease solar heating systems and geothermal heating and cooling systems – renewable energy systems. I had to try and figure out how to integrate my personal value set with a way to make money, and I finally did it. Part of it was serendipity, part of it was chance, and part of it was pure thinking. So I am now in the fortunate position where I am retired at the age of 40. By conventional definition I work 12, 13, 14, 15 hours each day, but to me it isn’t work. I have finally figured out a way to make money doing what I love. I never want to retire. I want to be like Peter Drucker. I personally can’t ever see myself retiring.
~Formula for Success ~
Gabriel Draven: Anthony Robbins has made millions of dollars doing seminars on the formula for success. You have to keep going out there and try to make your dreams happen. Most people give up on their dreams. They get locked into this comfortable place that’s not so comfortable. They find themselves making a reasonable income, so they’ve got bronze handcuffs on, and they find themselves buying things with that income, and it’s a trap. This has become their life, and they keep forgetting how much they actually hate it and how unauthentic it is.
The formula for success to me is, remaining angry and never forgetting what it is that makes you want to get up in the morning, never losing your edge and not getting too comfortable. I know people who live in wonderful houses, they constantly go on trips, they’ve got cars, they’ve got all the shit that we say makes them successful, but they are a couple of pay cheques away from insolvency. They couldn’t leave their jobs now even if they wanted to, because it would mean getting rid of all that stuff. Not many people are prepared to get rid of their stuff. It gets to the point where their stuff defines them, their possessions own them as opposed to them owning their possessions.
~Major Regret~
Gabriel Draven: There are two regrets that I have in life. The first I am resolving this year, and it’s that I have never traveled. Whether I have the money or not, I am going to travel this year. The second regret is that I have never had a long-term relationship. There are a lot of reasons for that, a combination of, I have never met the right person, but also, the past five years have been incredibly turbulent for me. Women aren’t too crazy about guys who bet the house. I will resolve this regret as well.
~Favourite Quote~
“To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence” by Mark Twain inspired me a few years ago, and I modified it to “There are only two things you need for success: courage and ignorance.” This modified quote has kept on coming back to me over the past couple of years, and it’s pretty dead on.
~Influential Book~
Gabriel Draven: The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck had a profound impact on my life. Not only is it a beautifully, profoundly written book, the guy ended up winning a Nobel Prize, but it is also a book about social justice. It’s a book about people, about the “haves” and the “have nots”, and I have been an underdog all my life. I have been a “have not” all my life. Even when I was making the money that I was making while working in the corporate world, I always considered myself to be on the outside and a “have not”.
The story takes place during the depression of the 1930s and it’s about a family of subsistence farmers or sharecroppers in Oklahoma. Their son gets out of prison for murdering a guy, and they feel that they are going to lose the farm, be kicked off the farm by the corporation that owns it. They get a handbill, which said that they were looking for help in California, so they decide to all go to California because of the jobs there.
They leave their farm and travel to California to look for work. What they didn’t realize was that there were cars traveling across the desert into California like ants. The problem was that everyone was getting the same handbill. As the book unfolds page after page, you sit there and think that no good can come from this, and you turn the page and you think again, no good can come from this. And, the family gets further and further into pure shit, and Steinbeck’s brilliance as a writer, is that even though you think that no good can come from this, you are left with the feeling that the family can somehow survive because that’s the kind of people they are, and because of the kind of people they come from. It’s kind of written into the DNA code of people who survive. It’s a brilliant, brilliant book. It’s pure genius.
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Author Bio: Avil Beckford, an expert interviewer, entrepreneur and published author is passionate about books and professional development, and that's why she founded The Invisible Mentor and the Virtual Literary World Tour to give you your ideal mentors virtually in the palm of your hands by offering book reviews and book summaries, biographies of wise people and interviews of successful people. Connect with me on Facebook and Twitter.
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