Why "doing the dishes" became my definition of success

I never shared this publicly because I was a bit ashamed to admit it.

There are aspects of "becoming successful" that don't get a lot of fanfare.

A few years back I was working a lot of hours at home. I would travel and speak. Then when I would get home, I would be doing a lot of work to book my next speaking engagements and serve my clients. Schedules like this work fine when you are single and in your 20s but when you start having a family, the grind for 80 hours a week begins to drag.

But when my wife and I had our first child, we decided she would stop working and become head of the household so our children could have a mom who was there.

I took a lot of pride in knowing I could support my family without my wife having to work. On the inside, I knew I had to grind even more. I couldn't let my newborn son down, I couldn't let my wife down. So I started traveling and speaking at higher rates.

There was one time when my first son was about 3 months old that I went on a 3 week speaking tour. The money was great, traveling to stages and impacting people was great but I started to become a public success but a private failure.

I wasn't taking care of home. And I felt justified in this, because if I didn't work, who would take care of the family financially?

And besides, I kept telling myself, it's just a busy season. I'll be busy for a bit and then I'll be able to chill when the busy season stops. But the funny thing is, the better you get at something, the less down time happens. I was present on the weekends (I'm grateful to observe the Sabbath and I don't work Friday night to Saturday night). So though I was enjoying the weekends, I wasn't handling my business in my household on the weekdays.

Throughout the day I would take some time to play with my son and still make money so therefore I was doing my job as the man of the household.

What I didn't realize was I was ignoring the needs of the most important person in the world to me...my spouse.

I felt like, it's ok, she'll be ok, she gets it. I'm grinding to be better for us.

Then we would get into arguments because she felt like I wasn't contributing enough around the house. And then I would get resentful because I felt that was her job. After all, my work allowed her to get massages whenever she wanted, have a housekeeper come in weekly, and buy whatever she wanted. So I thought I was providing her with the life she dreamed of.

Then we got into an argument over doing the dishes...yes...the dang dishes.

She felt that if she was cooking, then it was my job to clean up and do the dishes.

I agreed. But I don't know what it is...I HATE doing the dishes. I just hated it. I felt like it was a waste of time, I felt like I could be doing things so much more productive for the world than doing dishes.

So I would do them and then I would stop, or forget, or ask her to cover for me while I finished up on a project.

And she would get upset at me and I would think she was ungrateful and then we would get mad at each other. And something as stupid as the dishes would ruin both our days.

When my second son was born, I had a realization that who I had been for so many years needed to evolve. There was a need for me to step into my next level and 5 years ago I decided to create my first online course, the True Speaking Success System.

One of the reasons I created it was because my major revenue came from trading my time for money, speaking. Which I loved to do, but I realized I have a binge personality. It's hard for me to do something and not stop. And I realized I felt like I needed to be a workaholic because if I stopped working, the money train would come to a screeching halt.

And because I grew up in poverty, I didn't ever want to go back there or let my kids grow up in it. So I thought I had to grind because I needed to take care of my family and by doing so I couldn't stop working and I didn't have time to wash some stupid dishes. I had bigger fish to fry.

Creating my first online course allowed something to open that I never had before in my life. Freedom from work. With the course making sales, and with me coaching people online, I didn't have to travel as much because this additional stream of income gave me options, options I didn't have before.

There's one thing to know that there's more to life than money, and there is another thing to realize that money is important to give you the options you want. And I realized that I wanted the option to be able to slow down and wash dishes. Not because washing dishes is important but because being of service to my wife is one of the highest aspirations a good man can have.

I don't necessarily love washing dishes any more than before, but now I look at the act of washing dishes has radically changed. Now it's not a waste of my time, it's a way to serve my wife, to contribute to her needs and show her that she isn't alone in taking care of the home. It's a way I can show her that I love her through an act of service, so she knows I care about her.

It may sound strange, but I needed to start creating money not connected to my time so I could give myself permission to slow down and take care of my family more at the level they needed.

So creating my online course opened up the availability for me to be more present with my family. And that's one of the greatest blessings creating the online course in addition to my speaker career achieved. I'm sure if I was a much more evolved man, I would have figured this out beforehand, but hey, we all learn at different rates right!?!?

Every time I wash dishes now, and I start to feel like I'm getting annoyed, I remind myself that this is success. And then, it makes me smile.

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If you are interested in learning how I put together my first online course, I have a free video training I created on the subject, I'd be happy to just give it to you. Just type "Hook me up" in the comments and I'll DM you the link