Build To Win Big

Hi!

My name is Dan Shipton. I am a father to a wonderful 5 year old boy and the CEO of Change, a small startup based in Des Moines, Iowa. Thanks for reading my contribution to the Listserve project.

For me, 2014 was a shitty, get your teeth knocked in over and over kind of year. I focused most of my attention on saving a marriage that ultimately wasn’t meant to be at the expense of everything else. Basically, my life has been in maintenance mode for longer than I’d like to admit. So when I received the “You’ve Won!” email I literally laughed out loud — are there any worthwhile words I possibly write to 25k strangers?

I had resigned to not write anything, but was gently reminded how I got this far in life by a couple word magnets strung together on the side of a fridge at my office. Those words struck a chord with me today and I want to share them with you: “build to win big”

Building is something I’ve always been good at. Deliberately making the life I wanted for myself (and family). Letting people drift out of my life who I had outgrown and adding new ones in that would encourage me to be a better person. Same philosophy applied to work and the various projects I’ve been a part of. Grow, reinvent, stop doing what isn’t working. I’ve made a lot of personal progress over the last three decades following those rules.

Somewhere in the last few years, that intentional building of my life was slowly replaced by complacency, the status quo and hanging onto things I should let fade. But 2015 will hold a different outcome for myself. Now that you’ve all played a small part in getting me unstuck, it is time to go build to win big. Thanks for listening.

Dan Shipton
dshipton[AT]gmail.com
Des Moines, Iowa


p.s. I did have a pretty good story about a sales guy at work who went on vacation to China and never came back, too.

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