I'd been a math teacher for eight years. When my principal called me into the office I was sitting there thinking about how my students must have felt all the times I put them here.  As she yammered on about graduation rates and funding she said words that would change my life. And Dylan, that's why I need you to change these grades.

You see, in the state of Arizona, only teachers are allowed to hand out grades, and I had already done so. Those grades were final, and my students had failed the class and would not be graduating on time. I informed her that I was not going to do that because it would be unethical to do so. And then she looked me right in the eye and said, Dylan, I want to remind you that contracts haven't come out for next year, and maybe you should go home tonight and play with your daughter and think about what the right thing to do here is.

And I did exactly that. I went home and I played with my daughter thinking about what kind of man she needed me to be. What kind of father did she need me to be in that moment? And after she was sound asleep in her crib, I sat in my kitchen wondering what my next moves were. You see, I was not only working as a full-time teacher, but I had two additional jobs on top of that, and food stamps and rental assistants and all the other welfare programs, because despite working a full-time job and two additional jobs and welfare, I was still going further and further into debt every single month.

She had me. I didn't have a financial foundation enough to be able to tell her no. Even though I knew deep in my heart my daughter needed her father to be a man of his word and to have an ethical spine, to stand up to this level of coercion.

And I asked myself, sitting there that night, looking out the window at the drainage ditch that served as my backyard. And I said to myself, There's gotta be something more. There's gotta be something more that I can give to my children. Something more that I can aspire to, something more that I can build with for my wife and for my relationships. There's gotta be something more that I can give.

And it was in that moment that I realized that I was not going to bow to tyranny. I was not going to bow to this coercion. I was going to stand up and I was going to figure it out, and I could feel the change of domestications slipping off my wrists. As I realized to myself that I was not going to make lemonade with these lemons. No, I was going to freeze the lemons, build a lemon cannon and return fire, because if I bombarded life hard enough, it will stop giving me ammunition. And so the next day, I walked back into my principal's office and I invited her to do something incredibly uncomfortable with her suggestion. And when she told me she felt that I was making bad decisions, I invited her to do something physically impossible with herself.

This was the day in which Intuitive Finance was born, that I was going to take control of my financial life.

And I was going to live free because I was going to live life on my terms. I was going to be the man that it was always meant to be. The father, the husband, the community leader that I wanted to craft for myself began that day. And it's been eight years.

And in that time, I graduated top of my program when everyone else told me I was too old. I've advanced my careers in ways that have divide all cents and reason. And as I write these words, the person who I am is sitting in a house with a yard where my kids play a porch with a grill that is mine and a financial base where the next time somebody asks me to compromise my ethics, I can invite them to stick it all the way up until they find their molars.