We Need To Learn How To Be Thankful For All That We Have

I am now 42 years old and often times in my life I have thought to myself "I should have a lot more in my life at 42". It seems to me that my life has pretty much been one large chain reaction of bad things. Now I have had a few successes in the last 42 years but most them have been short lived. I used to joke that I could say on national TV my life story and people would cry at first and then those people would start laughing their butts off when they realize that their life has not had nearly as many bad breaks as mine.

Up until the age of ten my childhood was pretty normal. I was being raised by conservative judaism, my father worked and my mother stayed at home to take care of my brothers and myself. All that changed during my tenth year. My father filed for divorce because it had turned out that the only reason he had married my mom because her parents would then pay for my father to go through medical school. The year that I turned 10 my father was out of residency and creating his own practice.

The only memories I have of my childhood are just flashbacks. At 10 I had to grow up fast because I was now the man of the house. When I was 12 I was involved in a car accident which caused me to lose most of my memory before the age of 12. I do remember my fathers second wife a little but that marriage only lasted for about a year. She was a young nurse who only married my father for his money.

My fathers third marriage was pretty much the same. A young nurse who basically married him for money. They are still married today but my father found out a couple of years ago that she has been stealing money and putting it into her own personal accounts. I will not detail this marriage anymore but I will just leave that I am only the part of an old marriage. My half brothers are spoiled rotten and today they have nice cars, good jobs, and money in the bank.

I never really had the chance to go to college until I was like 25. At 18 my father told me to go to school and if I graduated he'd think about the possibility of reimbursing me. Since my father put me down as a tax deduction I was not able to get any financial aid so I pretty much had to give up the idea of going to college until much later in life. From age 25 until the age of 29 life was fairly good. I put myself through school and finished with an associates degree and had a cumulative GPA of 3.88.

At my graduation my father did attend which made me very happy to finally have earned some respect from him but I don't believe he ever reimbursed me for my costs to go to school and I think he only gave me like maybe $50 as a giftt. Graduation gifts were not the reason why I went to school. I wanted a career. I still owe the student loans today which are 15 years late..

Before school graduation, I had taken a couple of apprentice positions. After graduation, I was now going to work for a local Computerland as a programmer which is what I went to school for.. I was offered a small salary which doubled within like 9 months because I also became a sales broker for computer product.. I would have been happy working for this company for the rest of my life but the owner got greedy and after I had been there almost 2 years he wanted to put me on straight commission I had thought until this point that my boss was like the father I never really had. He was a mentor to me.

Correct me if I'm wrong here but for straight commission you might as well just be self employed. I had a wife and kids who depended on me. I could not work on straight commission for a small rate of 20 percent. So I knew a few local businesspersons who would finance my dealings so I started to set up deals by finding out what customers were looking for and then by finding a product supplier that had the best pricing. I did choose to stay in the computer industry where I already had customers. After 90 days of this I opened up my first business, a retail computer store with a wholesale operation attached.

For the next two years life was very good. Just prior to this my wife and I, while on vacation back home in Wisconsin, had bumped into an old child hood friend and my wife was telling him what I was doing in life. He was impressed and wanted to do the same thing, so my wife had offered him a job working for me. She had done this while I was in the little boys room. I will refer to this friend only as B from now on but he is partially responsible for motivating me to go into business for myself.

In this story I am not going to go into a great amount of detail but withing just 2 years I had built up a very successful business. My retail store did almost $1 million in sales its first year and my wholesale operation had done almost $5 million its first year. I had done a lot of successful advertising for the retail part and my former boss came to the conclusion that I must have been planning this all along. B made more money working for me then he had ever made in any other job and he got some expensive habits. He started to do side deals for counterfeit product to finance some of his habits. He had told my brother"S these are deals that Jeff would turn down anyways".

The FBI had found out about the deals that B was doing and so they picked B up, interrogated him, and apparently back then they were under the belief that it was always the boss man that was having the employees do these type of deals so they offered B immunity if he would testify against me. The basically gave B a way out of his future legal problems and all he had to do was use me as the fall guy. To this day B's whole business is counterfeit software, The FBI basically gave him a license to kill and I lost everything and had to do a year in prison plus while I was pretrial I had to be in federal custody. Basically 2 years of my life were lost and while I was in custody, since I was the breadwinner, my wife and kids had to live in homeless shelters. Talk about life going bad.

I won my appeal 11 days short of my entire sentence, so I was released in an orange jump suit and given a 1 way bus ticket. I was told by the prison that since I wasn't supposed to have been there I wasn't entitled to a new suit of clothes. I returned home and found my kids were almost ready to be expelled from school because of poor attendance so I had to devote a lot of time to getting them caught up. While I was away my youngest son had been physically abused by a babysitter and this led to a lot of guilt over the next ten years. My Mother in law passed away a week after my release so things were not good for my wife.

During the 19 months I was in federal custody article in seven languages had been written about me. Microsoft had done a press release titled "Pirate steals his way into jail" Of course it was never told that the majority of charges against me had been dropped because there really was no evidence against me. This had made extremely hard for me to work in the computer industry because piracy is a major no no in that industry and a lot of people did not want to do business with me. No pirated product had ever been found on my premises or in my possession all the feds had was testimony from a salesperson and a former customer of mine, both of these individuals were dealing in the counterfeit product themselves.

It has now been over a decade since I got out of prison and I now get disability full time. I have tried, to no avail, to get a full time career but over the last 10 years I've had a lot of jobs but all of them were just jobs and none of them lasted more than a few months. My disability comes from a drug I was put on when I was first released from prison. This drug had FDA approval, was supposed to be the cure for diabetes, but after a year people that were taking this drug were dying. I was only on this drug for 8 months which didn't kill me but cause a lot of serious organ damage. All of the friends I had before going to prison were no nowhere to be found.

Now I am almost 43 years old, I live on disability. While I was in prison my dad wanted to reposess the car that he had cosigned for 2 years ago because I could no longer keep up with the payments and rather than provide a home for my wife and kids he would rather maintain his 5 percent vacancy rate on all the apartments he owned. My half brothers have each been given $100,000 cars and had these great colleges paid for by my father and I have given a lot of thought that If I had been given that kind of start in life that I too would have a great career.

Recently I went to work for a Call center and I am taking pledges for St. Jude Children's hospital and for the training I had to watch some films that St Jude had done. These kids were fighting for their lives and have a lot less than I have. I have been told by many that I have a great phone voice and personality and if I could I would like to be able to do more for places like St. Jude. All of my current income goes for staying alive but even though my life has not been that great I still have a lot more than these kids whose lives are being cut short by these terminal illnesses.

Now, rather than dwell on my shortcomings, I think about all the people who have a lot less than what I have. The Law of Attractions helps me to maintain a positive attitude and hopefully some day good fortune will be attracted into my life. I wish that the movie "The Secret" would have shown us that there are a lot of people who think negatively in life and only attract these negative things. Always think to yourself "When God Made Me He was Just Showing Off".

There were a lot of other smaller negatives that happened in my life but this article was meant to be just a short version. I maintain several blogs and I give much more detailed information on them.