Career Confidence

26From Cop to Millionaire

Many years ago, I received a phone call from a New York City police officer by the name of Tony. The reason for Tony's call? He was looking for resume services because he was going to try to transition from being a police officer into a new job.

Now Tony was not very happy about this transition. You see, Tony was a cop, his dad was a cop, so was his grandfather and two of his brothers, and countless uncles, cousins, and friends.

But on this day, during that phone call, he told me that his wife, the mother of his children, was begging him to be something, anything other than a police officer.

Tony had married his high school sweetheart, and together they had five beautiful children, all girls. When they married, he had just graduated from the police academy, so his wife knew that his passion was in law enforcement.

But as the years went by and their family grew, she became more and more anxious that “something would happen to him” and she would be left alone, raising five girls.

Nothing had happened; he had not been hurt at all, but his wife kept having dreams about him being hurt or killed. Now, I am no psychiatrist, and most would call this a rational fear, but to her, the dreams kept getting more and more real, and her anxiety was spilling from her nighttime life to her daytime life, and their arguments over his career were on the path to derailing their happy marriage.

So, when Tony called and he told me his story, I believed his efforts at getting ...