I had a situation at work that I won't go into here but suffice it to say... I found myself being in a increasingly common situation as an overworked American who is being pushed to be more and more productive in a somewhat disfunctional culture and systems environment that was in my opinion lacking professional respect.

I did something that most advise against. I resigned. Three young daughters to feed and I resigned. Resigned after I had just worked so hard and gotten a promotion. My heart told me I needed to get myself out of there.

So now for the bold part. I have some savings. I have some side projects that I was kicking myself for never having enough time to complete. I have no excuses now. If I can work as hard as my former company worked me, I can build what I think are a few great ideas/stories that I can use to sell myself and my abilities at a higher level.

I plan to take at least a month off to work on these ideas and complete some things. I want to build a vision for Decision Support Systems that spark American capabilities to regain business leadership. I want to define a role in my company for outsourcing to Indian and Filipino firms. I want to document all of this as a step by step guide.

I want to be the story teller that I've been training to be since childhood. I will tell my vision, my story of the next advancements in American business intelligence. I will build a samples data warehouse based on my family pictures. I will build out a report "webstore" delivery system that I have sketched out to deliver automated report results.

Slowly and deliberately I will put these things out there in a very tangible form. In the meantime, I will continue to network, take on small contract jobs, and when I am not earning money, live off of a small savings I have been growing and by selling off vested stock options.

I will make my stand here and now and hopefully it will be as brilliant as it stands for me in my mind.