Welcome to The Dream Toolbox. I’ll explain what that means in a minute, but first I have an important question for you: do you have dreams for your life that always seem just beyond your reach?  If so, this podcast, and the ones, which will follow, are very specifically for you. They are designed to open windows of economic opportunity that most people don’t know even exist and to provide a set of skill based tools to enable a better life to reach their dreams. 

What I will have to say is designed particularly for young people just starting out, but is applicable to anyone who thinks they are condemned to a life lived in the lower levels of economic achievement because they are too young, too poor, a member of an ethnic minority, or a woman who thinks it is still a man’s world. It just isn’t so, and I hope I can demonstrate to at least some of those who hear this recording that age, poverty, gender, race—or any of a dozen other excuses people have for not living an abundant financial life—are just not that important. 

But dreams have to be converted to reality by work, and effective work requires proper tools.  That is why I call this the Dream Toolbox. 

But first of all, you need to know who the heck I am. Who is this guy who is purporting to give you ideas that might change your life? My name is Ken Aldrich and for many years I have been a serial entrepreneur, which simply means that I've started a flock of businesses and most of them have been successful enough so that I haven't had to work for many years except on things that I really wanted to do. I have also helped to finance a lot of other entrepreneurs trying to make their dreams come true and I’ve seen things that work and the things that don’t. 

Those experiences have changed my life, but it took me many years and a lot of luck to figure out the things I want to share with you and my goal now is to pay my good luck forward by saving you years of struggle if I can. 

I didn't start out wealthy. I started out as a 15-year-old kid working for 25 cents per hour as a car hop in a root beer stand, worked menial and boring jobs to get myself through school, and finally got a college degree and a graduate degree and went to work in a job that I really found I didn't like and I found myself wondering if all that effort was worth it. 

Fortunately, I found a way to change all that and have had many years of what I can only call, “a wonderful life”. But it took me many years of trial and error to discover that success is not about struggling to get a better job, but about building and using a set of mental tools that make fulfilling dreams easier, faster and more certain than I would ever have dreamed. Those are the tools in the Dream Toolbox. 

Now, what are those tools? Well there are lots of them and we can't cover them all in one short discussion, but there is one tool that is central to everything:  if you can change the way you look at yourself, if you can see yourself as in power in control of your own life now, then you can make your dreams come true and actually be in control of your life. You absolutely can do just that, and in the conversations that follow this introduction, I hope to teach you techniques to speed the process. 

Others you'll learn on your own once you start experimenting. So I hope you'll stay tuned and follow the conversations that follow this one. I’ll go into a lot of detail and show you lot of different tools, but I'm going to try to keep each conversation relatively short, so I'll close now and hope that you'll follow the ones that come after this. 

Thank you so much.