Jake Wood Was Once a Warrior, Then a Nonprofit Leader. Now He’s an Entrepreneur.
Jim Jones, a former professional football player and a leader in the Christian religion, says God has a plan for each of us, even when that plan is the opposite of what we thought.
Jackie Wood is an unemployed actor and the chief financial officer of a small nonprofit group, called St. Mary’s Home. After a long stretch of unsuccessful professional sports, he decided to take a big-picture approach. He applied his background in medicine and accounting to help St. Mary’s Home, a home for the elderly located in a small southern town.
But his plans weren’t exactly like he thought they would be. He found that St. Mary’s Home was struggling to meet its basic financial needs, so he turned to the only thing he knew: debt.
After three years of collecting the majority of his $100,000 annual salary, Jackie Wood says he’s still $19,000 in debt, and his salary (currently an estimated $75,000) is all he can afford.
“I’m just going to work every day of the week,” Wood says. “I’m not going to make any more money because I’m working the whole time, and I’m tired. That’s the only decision I made. I’ve gone from a professional athlete to a non-profit leader to a small business owner, and everything in between.”
How much of a non-profit leader are you? (Photo: Chris Young)
Like Jackie Wood, many of us have a vision and plan for what our lives should look like, but then we find we’ve failed to make it happen. Or it happens in reverse. In my book Living From Purpose: A Guide to Embracing Purpose in Real Life, I describe this process as the curse of perfection.
The curse of perfection is the idea that all we need to do is to be perfect, focus everything in our lives on creating those perfect outcomes, and then the world will magically take care of itself.
But that’s not how things work.
Sometimes we’re surprised. Other times we’re