It happened suddenly. At the beginning of the week I had a successful career at a multinational high-tech company. By Friday I had decided to leave and chase a dream. I must have been nuts.

I should explain that I have always wanted to have my own company but it was one of those dreams that remained comfortably in some indefinite future. I could always rationalize why now wasn't a good time to start my own business. I had a family to support, bills to pay and it was nice to have those corporate walls to keep me cozy. But it was the sort of cozy that the slowly boiling frog finds cozy.

In reality, life in the corporate world was sapping my soul. I am a person that likes to feel I have accomplished something. I take great pride in a job well done but constant reorganizations and changes in corporate direction made it very difficult to make progress. No sooner had I got into the groove of a project than the world changed and the project was either cancelled or radically changed. It was a criminal shame as many of these projects had a lot of merit but the company had just lost its direction and didn't really know what it wanted any more. It felt as if strategy was replaced with a "we'll know it when we see it" sort of attitude. Unfortunately we never did see it.

Anyway, on Monday afternoon, we received the news that the latest project we were working on was to be cancelled. I truly grieved that cancellation. It had seemed that at long last we had traction and were making good progress. The project looked to be a money maker and achievable in a reasonable time frame. Nonetheless, the powers-that-be decided to place their investments elsewhere and we were all to find new projects to work on. For me it was the last straw.

About a month previously the company had announced that it needed to reduce staff and was offering everyone a fairly generous severence package. Previously I had not considered taking it but after the project cancellation, it suddenly looked very attractive. I know you might be thinking that this sounds like one of those incredibly stupid emotional decisions but it really wasn't. For me, it was as if a cloud had fallen from my eyes and I could see that I was wasting my life. Heck, I am in my mid-forties and time is ticking. Did I really want to have a shot at running my own company or not? If I did, this was perhaps the best opportunity I would ever get. I have had years of extensive worldwide marketing experience and with the severence money I could potentially buy a company or set up my own.

It was time to really examine myself; to look at my motivations, my personality and capabilities to see where I could go. It was also time to talk about dreams and the future with my wife and my kids about what we really wanted from life. It was time to take back control of the future that I had ceded to my employer. I was also hoping that in diving from the high board into the pool -- that the pool actually had some water in it!

To be continued....