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(This is part 3. You should start the story here if you haven’t already.)

I had commenced the butt-kicking and name-taking in my career at AT&T a year earlier. But as a creative dude, I salivated at the thought of a career (or side gig) making something.

In April of 2012, that opportunity arose at my church. I took a part-time job as the director of worship, but balked at that title in favor of “music guy and lead geek.”

I lead the music on Sunday mornings (selecting the songs and training/rehearsing with a band of musicians each week). If you are looking to put that into a business experience category, I’d file it somewhere in between delegation, project management, hitting a recurring hard deadline, working as a part of a team (and over a team), public speaking, live audiovisual setup and management, recruiting, and (borderline extreme) multitasking.

Another significant role I’ve undertaken for the church is web-mastery. I manage the content for our website, functioning as an editor for blog content and a writer for much of that content. I’ve also committed to sending out a weekly “News and Events” email, and haven’t missed a week!

In 2012, that email list averaged over a 35% open rate (approximately 200% of the non-profit industry average) and a 9% click rate (450% of the industry average). I think the related business “file” for that is apparent. I can (and do) write engaging content. Regularly.

My work for the church has been a fantastic creative outlet, but side gigs are side gigs, right? The only catch in the story is that my side gig required me to have Sunday mornings free. With the holiday season approaching, working in retail made for a Thanksgiving horizon line. Something would have to give.

So, in November of 2012, I went “all in” on a career change, and it didn’t go at all like I’d planned. You can read about that in the next chapter.

(This is part 2. You should start the story here if you haven’t already.)

My first 8 years out of college were spent like most in my generation: finding out how I fit into the universe, followed by haircuts and real jobs at drive through windows.

From there, it was on to AT&T, where I got a job “connecting people to their world” selling communications solutions at a retail store. I overlapped this job with my stint as a drive-through wizard, making for frequent days where I started at 5:00 AM hawking coffee in one store and ended at 8:30 PM selling phones in the other, standing the entire time.

From day one at AT&T, I was a top performer, not only in my store, but in the entire sales region. In Q4 2011 (my second full quarter selling) I was distinguished with a Silver Award placing me in the top 20% of the region’s leader board; two quarters later I received the Gold Award—that’s for the top 4% in a metric that combines sales numbers and customer satisfaction.

Our store (in which I finished 3rd that month) was ranked in the top 15 stores in the nation (a pool of more than 2,000 stores) for May of 2012.

Additionally, I was one of the first 3 reps in my store to achieve “Small Business Certification” for closing high-revenue business deals. I once activated 60 iPads in one day, cursing the Apple engineer who designed the difficult-to-access SIM tray.

The short version of my time at Ma Bell: I am really good at selling things.

What can’t be quantified with my sales numbers is something about which all of my superiors (not just those at AT&T) would agree: I come to work on time, ready to work, and with a positive attitude. Among my pet peeves is an entitlement attitude that would permit employees to rationalize stealing company time and resources for personal use, or worse, having a bad attitude at work like some sort of cancerous tumor spreading negativity.

My deepest vocational passion is that people be delighted to deal with me. It’s how I convinced thousands of people to gladly purchase a case for their mobile phone from me that they could order on that mobile phone from Amazon.com for 30% less. My customer service and expertise sets me apart.

I’m worth a 30% mark-up.

My career at AT&T was scratching the most fundamental of itches (feeding my family) but left one significant itch thoroughly untouched: my desire to create.

On April 1st of 2012 (no foolin!) that itch received it’s first finger-full of salve. You can read about it in the next chapter.

(Want to skip to the punch line? Part 5 outlines how I can help you.)

I earned my undergraduate degree in Pre-Unemployment (with a focus in early 21st century barista trends).

Actually, make that degree “Religious Studies” and the focus “Early American Religious History” and you’ve got a better idea of why I just skip straight to prepping for unemployment. In its defense, my degree is highly regarded among graduate school applicants and admissions agents across a broad spectrum of fields.

Immediately following my undergrad career I spent 8 years in vocational Christian college ministry. Before you write off that time as “non-profit” for the rest of my employment life, keep in mind that over that time I personally developed more than $400,000 using an interactive sales presentation, complete with cold call, referral ask and financial close. Also thrown in the experience bucket:

• delegation
• time management
• volunteer coordination
• public speaking
• personal coaching
• grief counseling
• web content development
• viral marketing experience
• social media pioneering
• ultimate frisbee domination. (perhaps a bit of revisionist history in this bullet point)

In the summer of 2010, owing to a number of factors both beyond and within my control I started using that “Pre-Unemployment” degree. Two small children, a wife, and a strong aversion to taking money from the government led me to the doors of Starbucks Coffee Company, where I started in October(ish) of 2010.

My first “real job” as Barista was exhilarating (minus the 4:00 AM wake-up time) and I found a lot of joy in knowing people’s drinks, making it my personal mission to elicit smiles first thing in the morning. It’s also where I continued honing my sales technique, quickly becoming our store’s leading seller of VIA—Starbucks instant coffee (where a sizable chunk of revenue margin lives for the company) selling it out of the drive-through window.

While there were many things I loved about SBUX, the pay was not enough to cover the needs of my family of 4, which led me to the most physically excruciating 6 months of my life. Read all about it in the next chapter in this tale.

I joined Audible.com last month (thanks in part to my new 30 minute commute) to listen to audio books. My first pick was the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. Here’s a crack at a review of it.

First off, it is phenomenally written, and the narration of the audio book is superb. There were only a handful of spots that were not engaging for me, but most of that was around the early diagnosis of Job’s cancer and the intricacies of that. Perhaps it was the medical terminology that alienated me, but either way I found my mind wandering.

What strikes me most about Steve’s life is the polarity. There was no middle ground for him. Something (or someone) was either the best ever, or total [excrement]. Isaacson does a good job of giving insight about Steve that makes it clear that there is deep respect for the man, but that this book is not an “inside job” where faults are whitewashed and successes overblown.

As I’ve navigated the last couple of years of my life through full-time Christian ministry into “secular” work and now this new strange hybrid of marketplace/part time worship leading, it put me in a unique position to receive the content of this book. My perspective on meaning and purpose has been tumble-dried and refolded since 2010.

I don’t care to make this book review a critique of Job’s spirituality, but what I saw throughout the book was a relentless search for purpose. Every product launch, every innovation and invention, every day of his life was spent trying to “make a dent in the Universe.”

And he did make a dent. If the browser window you are reading this post in has a rounded rectangular shape to it, it was Steve Jobs who insisted on that. (even if you are reading it on a PC, they kind of wholesale ripped-off the Macintosh Graphical User Interface multiple times over.) Jobs undeniably made a mark on society and on business.

As any good biography should, this book forces the reader to self-examine, to evaluate, and to a certain extent reorder your life around the framework of a life so well-lived that we write books about it.

It left me wondering if, given the opportunity to speak from the grave in 100 years, Steve Jobs would still insist on “making a difference” in the ways that he did while he lived.

Isaacson weaves together the different segments of Jobs’ life in a compelling way. The book is definitely worth a read. By way of warning, there is a significant amount of foul language throughout the book, as Isaacson quotes Jobs and others who had little regard for linguistic restraint.

Also worth mentioning is the fact that I consumed the entire thing on an Android device. Because I’m a rebel.

I just finished my first week with my new job. I’m sure you’ll skip down to the bottom to read all about that, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

In January of 2011 I met with my pastor to ask his advice on when it is appropriate for a grown man with a family of 4 to ask for financial help from his church or his family. I was a Barista with a new part time gig at AT&T but the commission checks had not arrived and I was panicking.

A large tax “return” coupled with an instant promotion to full time at Ma Bell was enough to render the point moot. I had a real job.

AT&T retail, as entry level jobs go, is phenomenal. Thorough training, free top-of-the-line phone, and a commission structure that makes it easy (with the right effort and focus) to make a great living.

In June of 2011 my benefits kicked in and I was able to quit Starbucks and reduce the amount of time standing up each week from 70 hours to 55.

Retail hours plus the fact that I took over as music guy at my church were the catalyst for beginning a job search in earnest in the spring of 2012.

All along Jacqueline would remind me that she was praying very specifically for a new job on November 1st. I thought it was a bit of a pipe dream, but I kept it to myself.

After a couple of “not a fit” job interviews and even an offer from another company, November was on the horizon. I had interviewed at a company named “Wingswept” in early October, but hadn’t heard much back from them. But a bit of persistence and roughly 5 assessments later, my hiring manager made what turned out to be the deciding gesture by driving 30 minutes to hand deliver the offer letter, on November 2nd.

I just finished my first week as an Account Manager (fancy way to describe telesales) for Wingswept, in their Vertical Markets division. I sell websites to Auto Repair Shops. This company is the real deal. They take care of employees and customers like they are family.

I love it.

Thanks, AT&T, for a great two years. I’ll be a mobile phone customer for a long time. And if you get UVerse in my neighborhood, call me.