The New American Dream

The New American Dream

Happy 4th of July. While enjoying your BBQ and your fireworks, I want you to take some time to reflect on what it means to be American and to enjoy the freedom and independence you are granted by this country. Celebrate, but also understand the duty you have to your country to fulfill the New American Dream.

July 4, 1776 is the day the Declaration of Independence was ratified. Among the statements made by the document, my favorite is the claim that unalienable rights are granted to all people. Those rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are rights that the majority of Americans fail to take advantage of today. We are a mostly complacent and uninspired society in need of a new set of goals to work towards.

The Old American Dream, once upon a time, promoted pulling yourself up from the challenges of settlement of a new part of the country, or immigration to this land of prosperity. You strived to take advantage of these rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that the nation granted you, and over the course of your life it meant that you could create innovation, art, and families that could continue to build on the resources you enjoyed from your elders and the new ones you created in your lifetime.

My Family

My family certainly has fulfilled the Old American Dream.

My maternal grandmother left the Netherlands at the end of World War II, her entire family not knowing a word of English, and settled in Montana in the late 1940s with a couple of dollars and suitcases to their possession. My maternal grandfather was born on a farm in Montana. His father died young, and my grandfather was left to manage the family farm before shipping off in the draft to Germany during WWII.

My maternal grandparents met at church, and my grandfather got a degree in electrical engineering through the G.I. Bill. He died with several patents to his name, my grandmother survives in comfortable retirement, and my mom and her sister both lead successful careers in their respective fields.

My father left home at the age of 17 to attend medical school across the country from his hometown in Southern India. At 23, he left India altogether for London to pursue a more prosperous life with his medical degree. He arrived with a handful of British Pounds and found a friend’s couch to sleep on. Over the next several years, he toiled through the British medical system, volunteering for drug and vitamin experimentation, getting underpaid, and living off rice and basic sardine curry he could afford to buy from the local store.

My parents met in London in 1988 and quickly fell in love. They lived and worked in London for a few years before moving back to Seattle in 1993.

My dad worked two internship-type jobs while earning his Masters in Psychology, and went to work as a mental health therapist at the University of Washington. Over the next 18 years, he rose up to become the Director of Mental Health for the university, an impressive title with influential and important responsibilities, which he saw through with complete satisfaction.

He ultimately left to delve full-time into a burgeoning private practice, and over the last handful of years I have watched my dad grow that business into something that gives him the freedom of time and finances that he sought for all those years of hard work that led him to that point of success.

My mom, left her position as a nurse after nearly three decades, going back to school for her Masters in Nursing. She now holds the role of Global Educator at her globally regarded research organization and spends her time working to alleviate the global disparity in medical practice excellence and knowledge via conferences and education around the world.

She started her Masters one year after I graduated from my Bachelors program, illustrating the focus my Mom placed on giving me the resources for success to the extent I could utilize them prior to focusing on her own ambitions. She also worked part-time for my entire childhood, ensuring that I had a ride to school, a packed lunch, a basketball coach, and a clean house to return home to each day.

My family has clearly achieved the Old American Dream. We have some financial resources, access to a supportive community, and to draw upon the 1999 definition by Ted Ownby, universal access to products, freedom of choice, abundance of resources, and novelty of consumerism.

The New American Dream

With the definition of the Old American Dream fulfilled for my family, it seems wrong that I should be striving for the same goals, considering the progression of society, the capability of our resources, and the opportunities available in the USA today.

I got the word “Driven” tattooed on my shoulder in Lamborghini font at 19 years old, both because I felt I was “relentlessly compelled by the need to accomplish a goal, extremely hard-working and ambitious” and because driving cars was my absolute favorite activity of all time. I didn’t know it at the time, but that tattoo would become the beginning of something massive – something I call the New American Dream.

The New American Dream manifests in the Driven person in all of us. The person who emerges when you take stock of your accomplishments relative to the work you have put into your life and say “I could do more.”

We have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness at our disposal, and we must take advantage of them. The New American Dream that all of us should be striving for is comprised of three components: 1) achieving thriving financial success; 2) creating a physically capable body; and 3) doing what you love.

By pursuing the accomplishment of these three things over the course of your life, you will have lived a meaningful, contributing life that furthers your legacy and your impact on society to a great extent, enabled by today’s America.

In my head, the Old American Dream was this – home ownership with a white picket fence, a secure job, and a content family life. 2 cars in the garage. And I tried, to abject failure, to conform my ways of thinking to this dream. I downplayed massive aspirations of Lamborghinis and tried to spend time making small talk, attending high school house parties, going to college, avoiding risk, and being popular.

After multiple failed suicide attempts, showing up drunk to class or skipping because of a nasty hangover, and a few too many close calls with drunk driving, I made it into recovery from alcoholism at the end of my senior year of college. I was named Most Outstanding Accounting Student, graduated with High Honors, and had an incredible resume of internships and accolades that had me facing an incredibly lucrative career with any financial institution I could name.

It was not hard. I was living well below my potential while outperforming at a school that was, for most, a dream come true to attend. My outperformance was not due to any natural ability, but due to the goals that I set for myself and the intentional work I put in to achieve them. I watched many others go through the same experience during my time in college.

In the years following my graduation from college, I completely threw away the notion that I must live for the Old American Dream, and instead followed the teachings of many influential people, who helped me redefine and begin to achieve what I have now defined as the New American Dream.

My Business Success

Within three years of my shiny new job, I was burnt out from politics, failing to climb the ladder at a pace satisfactory to my already muted ambition, and not making nearly enough money to fulfill the hobbies I had begun to blossom into – collecting, building, and racing cars.

In college, I encouraged my peers and younger students to pursue whatever postgraduate job that they desired, regardless of security, possibility, or barriers to entry. I firmly believed that despite whatever your career counselor says, that if you build the right relationships and the right skills, you could have any job you wanted.

After college, this practice and skillset became a side hustle as a career coach. I made less than $2,000 in the existence of Professional Success Coaching, but created something much more valuable than the income and results from my coachees: I wrote a book. In the book, I outlined my own story of identifying an “ideal career” and the path it would take to get there. I wrote that I am ideally suited to be an independent strategy consultant to the automotive aftermarket, pairing my business capabilities with my entrepreneurial mindset in the world of my passion for cars and car enthusiasts.

I stared at my frustrating career to date, and realized that I had the opportunity to pursue another way. So I gave it all up and launched a consulting business focused on the automotive aftermarket.

As I write this, Driven Performance Advisors is a six-figure company, advising on millions of dollars of automotive aftermarket business growth and transactions. I am working my way to affording the ability to buy anything I want, including goods, time, and space, and I know that via my companies I will get there. It was not easy to get to this point – probably in a roughly similar way it was not easy for my dad to move from India to London with no money.

My Physical Capability

I’ve been a gym goer since 2015. I lifted weights in high school, played basketball and ultimate frisbee, and though of myself to be relatively in shape. Of course I was not a perfect physical specimen, but just a few tweaks away from perfection. My relationship with food seesawed between “I need to eat more to get more muscular” and “I need to eat less to lose weight” with not much more knowledge behind it than that. I woke up at 4:30AM daily, worked 12 hours a day no problem, and went to the gym 7 days a week. I was already ahead of the pack with my physical capability.

In 2021, I lost 53 pounds, going from 257 on Valentines Day to 204 the following Valentines Day. I went from “just a few pounds down and I’d have a six pack” to losing 4 inches off my waistline. I became massively more physically capable – my endurance, bodyweight strength, mobility, and physical skillsets all improved dramatically.

This took adherence to a rigorous diet, exercising twice a day for nearly half the year, and completely revolutionizing the way I look at food for the better. It was hard, but I did it – probably roughly as hard as my grandparents moving from Montana to Seattle for my grandfather to start a new job with a young child.

Loving What I Do

Like I mentioned previously, I threw myself into my passion far cars at the age of 23. I currently own 5 cars, and I am well on my way to a large collection and a successful career as an amateur racer.

My work, on top of my purely hobbyist activities, is solely centered around the automotive industry. My writing, my consulting, my investing, and my building of new companies all stems from my passion for cars. Everything I do with regard to my career and my personal activities is related to cars. If I were to live a life of freedom and the pursuit of happiness, which IS the American life, it would be the one I’m living, full of cars. I love what I do.

To say that, and to fully commit myself to that statement, took a lot of work and convincing from many successful influencers and role models I have in my life, who drive cool cars, are in good shape, and have built large and thriving businesses. Nevertheless, today I can say I am living a life taking full advantage of the rights granted to me by the country I live in. I have those men and women to thank for their teachings and leadership by example.

So in conclusion of my story – I am working on a business that is thriving and will bring me financial success, I have a physically capable body, and I love what I do. And to get there, I had to work hard. How hard, relative to what my family who came before me had to go through, I can’t say – but to me, I was pushing myself hard to achieve significantly more with my life.

About You

Can you say all of that is true for yourself? Can you say you are truly taking advantage of the freedom and unalienable rights that this country grants you? Are you REALLY living your life to its fullest potential in the only country in the world that really makes that possible? Are you pushing yourself as hard as your family before you pushed themselves to give you what you have? Or instead…are you living for the Old American Dream?

A secure job. A content family. Consumerism. Your own house.

That dream, today, is not enough. It does not compel us to reach for our highest potential and live the best life that we could possibly live.

You are not entitled to anything, but that dream is very easy to accomplish with minimal effort. I encourage you to set a larger goal and watch your entitlement disappear. You will need to work hard to accomplish the New American Dream.

For me, the New American Dream pushes me constantly. It pushed me to create We Are Driven to spread this message and help car enthusiasts build themselves into the beacon for their communities to spread it even further. It can push you too, to solve whatever problems you see that need solving in the world. To live your best life for you and all the generations to follow. Don’t you want that for yourself?

There are no excuses that can stand in your way of that. The freedom we have in this country allows you to seek any solution possible for any problem you may be facing. There are solutions, and a mindset, for any problem that can help you make those things not a problem anymore. Let nothing stand in the way of you living the best possible life that you can live.

As you enjoy your 4th of July, Independence Day, think about your duty to the country. You are independent. You are free. You have all of the potential in the world to live the best life that you can possibly live. You can create thriving financial success. You can build a physically capable body. You can love what you do.

It just takes a Driven mindset, an ability to endure through hard work, and a relentless desire to achieve the biggest goal you can possibly set for yourself.

You have the entire country behind you. We all have some Driven within us. All of us can set big goals and overcome the challenges standing between you and achieving that goal.

We are Driven. Happy Independence Day.