As years passed, I leveraged my independence of voice into an independence of thought and changed the way I did business at work. I improved myself. I put in thousands and thousands of hours of extra work that wasn’t required of me until I performed better and demonstrated better perspective and vision. By 2006, I declared an independence from the way I did business, and joined an entrepreneur’s business.

You can choose independence. You can opt to live your life by your own guidelines. It takes one very consistent trait, and one learnable skill: persistence and self-confidence.

Everything I’ve accomplished in the last few years comes from hard work, self-education, and a lot of effort put into my self-esteem. I threw away concepts like that one were we think “they” keep me from succeeding. You can’t win a race looking sideways.

Where has it taken me? I’m 1/3 of the way through my trajectory. I’ve got SO much more coming to share with you. But from where I’m sitting, I’m pretty damned happy to be independent, and working towards interdependence.

Happy Fourth, America. Hello to the rest of the world, too.

On the way out, I’ll share some snaps of just a few of the people I think rock their own kind of independence:

To show a select few.