"Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith." - Steve JobsIf you still have not achieved your financial goals and don't feel like you are making much progress down the right path for you then you need to find the life brick to hit you in your head and light a fire under you like never before.Every journey has ups and downs but it's those challenging times, the trial by fire, that really shapes us and strengthens an individual. You either let your dreams die in that dip or you power through and come out the other side better.I've been hit by bricks a few times and each time I have come out stronger, even though I wasn't sure that I could power through. The support system I was born with and then built around me has helped me each time but after my last venture failed, I was purely focused on getting back to square one.Then the latest brick hit hard!

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My wife of 10 years told me last May on our anniversary that she had a present for me in the bathroom. Little did I expect to see a positive pregnancy test. This would be our third child after having two boys, Luke now 6 and Liam, 4. This third one was within the timeframe we had set to keep them all close but it was still a surprise.I spent the entire weekend jotting down what ideas I could dust off and what relationships I had not tapped in order to build a new venture and leverage the knowledge I had gained from the last failure and my time working with a hedge fund since.Without that brick, I would have spent the next 2 years merely getting back to square one, rebuilding my credit, rebuilding my savings and being ultra-conservative but instead, I decided that I had 6 months to launch and squeeze in 1 year of travel because I would be on lockdown by mid-January then need to be there with our new daughter and the recovery of my wife.

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I made sacrifices and invested personal capital in the trips and meetings that I felt made sense.I shared multiple business ideas with potential partners for feedback, refined them, spoke to potential investors and kept iterating until I felt comfortable making the big ask.I also opened myself up to ideas that I myself did not generate but that I could help scale and that led me to embrace RunLive.fit which energized me even more.I came on board as the second person involved, working hard to refine the launch plan, updating the investor pitch and becoming the first outside investor in the company. RunLive made me even more confident that my overall investment firm model was viable when a close friend who has previously invested in my ventures offered to invest again.I did not waste time haggling since it was the first person in, I've known him since we were 3 years old and he was a known quantity as an investor, helping me raise over $330,000 in the past. We struck a deal and got the show on the road.

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Two months later we had a $1 million commitment from a highly reputable investor after only asking for $250,000, a $3 million commitment for a fund and a joint venture agreement with an investment firm.If you told me at the start of 2017 that I would be having another child and that this event would drastically alter my entrepreneurial trajectory by lighting a fire under my ass then I would have told you that there was no way that would happen.Being comfortable is the enemy of chasing your dreams and taking calculated risks. Look for the brick life is throwing at you and do not duck. It is probably going to knock some sense into you and help you to realize that you are wasting time not pursuing that idea you shelved and came up with many excuses about why you could not try it.

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I will not pretend that everyone reading this can repeat exactly what I did but it is more important to understand WHAT changed mentally that allowed me to feel confident to leap into the unknown, while working part-time, and how that confidence led to positive outcomes.

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