I want to take a moment and share a personal story. I recall when I sold my last company, PacificHost.
I can still remember that moment vividly. There I was in the boardroom of the company getting ready to acquire everything I had worked so hard to build over the past few years. It was full of their company directors and executive staff and I was intimidated by all these people here to buy something I had created only a few years prior.
They put the final acquisition papers on the table and I signed them along with a big applause after I signed the last one. The lawyer was on the phone with the bank and authorized them to send the money to my account. Then the CEO walked in, shook my hand, and asked me how it felt. I answered something along the lines of “It feels good, thank you!” In my head though, I wasn’t thinking about how good it felt; I was thinking about all the work that lay ahead of me, of having to spend the next two days wasting my time giving them all the technical info they needed to take over the operations.
Looking back at that those few days, I can oddly remember what I was thinking, but not what I felt. I was day-dreaming about everything I was going to buy later on that I thought would give me happiness. My awareness was solely focused on what I will do to be happy in the future without considering the idea that I could be happy at that…