Guest post by Tim Kellis, author of Equality: The Quest for the Happy Marriage
Boy this is a good question. As it turns out I have re-written my life’s scripts 3 times.
I received my undergraduate degree in engineering in 1985 from the University of Missouri-Columbia. As graduation approached I began interviewing for jobs, and landed one as an engineer for AT&T at their manufacturing facility in Lee’s Summit, MO, outside of Kansas City. After receiving a patent for a process I redesigned, and getting the attention of upper management for my ambition, I was offered a promotion and moved to Blacksburg, VA, where I worked as an applications engineer.
After doing this for a year and a half I grew antsy and got a job in Dallas working in sales for AT&T, selling elecommunications equipment for GTE. I was one of the first sales people to sell to GTE. But my ambition and restlessness was acting up again, so I looked to move on, and took a job at another company, DSC Communications, the company who got started by selling equipment to MCI, when MCI first began selling long distance service. My dad couldn’t believe it. How could I leave AT&T? In his mind, my career was set with my job at AT&T. After all, I could spend my entire career there. He couldn’t understand why I would want to leave such a prestigious firm. So my first big change in life happened.
My second one came about because of my unease at selling, and because I fell in love with the stock market. In 1994 I left my career selling communications equipment to go back to school to get my MBA. Again, my dad didn’t understand why I would want to leave a successful career in sales. But, after graduation I landed on Wall Street as the first semiconductor analyst to focus on the communications market. When my dad found out how much money I was making he suddenly didn’t question my career change. So came my second big life change.
None of this compared with what was to come. As it turned out, I began working on Wall Street right as we were finishing the final stages on the biggest bull market in history, and I was right in the middle of it. Changes in my Wall Street career happened fast and furious, moving from a small firm in Dallas, to a bigger firm in Boston, finally landing in New York working for one of the most prestigious firms on The Street. And I began in 1993 with an initial investment of $7,000, and grew my portfolio at the peak of the market to $12.5 million. Suddenly my dad didn’t question my career any longer.
But the bottom was about to fall out from underneath me. First my portfolio crashed. Then my relationship fell apart with a girl I was engaged to. And then I lost my job. Boy, life has its interesting twists and turns, as I like to say. Most importantly, I was crushed by the breakup of my relationship. Yes, losing my portfolio was difficult and yes losing my job was difficult, but I couldn’t understand how a relationship that was supposed to last a lifetime could end.
Thus came my third life change. After my fiancée and I went to see a therapist to solve our relationship problems and after realizing that he wasn’t really helping, I decided that I was going to solve the marriage problem.
After losing my job I took on the task of researching, reading 100 books over a 10 month period, followed by writing for 9 months. So my career has taken a turn I could have never imagined. I have gone from being a very successful Wall Street analyst to becoming a writer. My joke when I landed on Wall Street was “be careful wanting something, it just might happen”, and that saying has taken on a whole new meaning in my life now.
Now I am an entrepreneur whose job is not only to sell books but to save marriages. While success hasn’t happened yet I wake up every day believing that someday people will realize that they don’t have to suffer through the pain of an unhappy marriage, that there is help. This is my motivation for taking on what I believe is the biggest problem society faces today.
Am I scared? Yes, very, but failure is not an option to me, it can’t be. While I know there are tons of books written on relationships, and 149,000 therapists working in this country, I realize none of them have really come up with a conclusive solution. Most of the messages from the “experts” cover only a small portion of what is needed to solve the marriage problem. I realize that I must keep pushing forward, so I take my fear and push it to the background.
About the author
Renowned Wall Street
analyst Tim Kellis takes on what
could be considered society’s biggest problem today: divorce. The journey that
led to him tackling such a significant issue was both personal and
professional. After a successful career that eventually landed him on Wall
Street, Tim met what he thought was the girl of his dreams, only to see that
relationship end with bitterness and anger. The journey included work with a
marital therapist, and after he discovered the therapist wasn’t really helping
decided to tackle the issue himself.
Ambition and a strong aptitude for math helped lead Kellis to discover how to
make relationships work. His math skills led directly to an engineering degree,
nine years in the telecommunications industry, an MBA in finance, and finally on
to Wall Street, where he became the very first semiconductor analyst to focus
on the communications market.
After publishing a 300-page initiation piece entitled Initiating Coverage of
the Semiconductor Industry: Riding the Bandwidth Wave, Kellis became a leading
semiconductor analyst at one of the biggest firms on Wall Street. The
experience he gained as a Wall Street analyst provided an excellent backdrop
for becoming an expert on relationships, and resulted in his relationship book
entitled Equality: The Quest for the Happy Marriage.
You can visit his website at www.happyrelationships.com
or his blog at www.questforthehappyrelationship.blogspot.com
About the Book
The journey through “Equality: The Quest for the Happy
Marriage” includes a trip through history, where the most significant lessons
civilization has learned over the last few thousand years are used to
demonstrate not only the way to set up a positive relationship, but the causes
of that relationship turning negative.
Additionally, I dive into the science of psychology to answer the most basic
question anyone asks who goes through the pain of divorce, “why didn’t we work
out”?
The basic premise of the book is that we have a 50% divorce rate yet there
doesn’t appear to be anything happening to help solve this problem. Just
because divorce has become a significant part of our culture doesn’t mean we
should simply sit back while countless families suffer through the agony of
splitting up.
The toll to society tomorrow because of our culture of divorce today is
impossible to determine but future generations will have to deal with this
change to the culture that has occurred over the last two generations.
For the first time in history I elaborate on a psychological solution to our
psychological problems so that couples can learn how to change the direction of
their negative relationships. In essence, the psychological objective is to
understand what happens mentally between two people who make one of the most
important decisions of their lives, to get married.
The objective of this book is to provide real, logical help to couples so that
they can learn how to stay out of the divorce trap. The bottom line is to learn
how to set up your relationship so that you can maintain a happy, healthy,
harmonious, loving, affectionate, intimate marriage.
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