The Box Car

This auspicious looking vehicle was, with love, relegated to the rubbish bin today. It sat proudly in my home office for the past six years serving as a gorgeous memory.

It was lovingly created for me by my husband. As you can see, it’s a cardboard box, with some fairly rudimentary drawn on wheels, personalized glamour license plate and a little name-tag saying that it’s the Inconceivable Enterprises company car.

Every time I think about my company car I smile.

If I flash back to when my husband gave me this “box,” it was about three months after I sold my real estate agency. I was suffering terrible separation anxiety from this entity I’d created. I missed my team, I missed my workplace, I missed my desk and I was venturing out into the unknown in following new paths and adventures (under my company Inconceivable Enterprises).

I was working from home and feeling completely lost and utterly directionless. Every day for so long I had awoken with a purpose, a corporate home, goals to achieve and things to do. Now I was waking up and walking down the hallway to my “office” and spending most of the day in my pyjamas!

I was coping poorly with the transition and my husband, seeing this (and perhaps hoping to coax me out of my ugg boots), whipped up this gorgeous company car for me.

It had the desired affect. It put a smile on my face. It gave me a kick in the butt and it also left me with something joyous in my office to look up to and smile if I ever felt low or lonely.

Over the following months I ramped up my corporate speaking work, set up a passive online business, wrote my second book and hired my first staff member (making it that little bit more difficult to spend all day in bedware).

It was just a simple box that my husband knocked up in a few minutes, but there was love behind it. There was meaning behind it. It inspired me.

I’ll always have the memory of my box car and will always try to remember that little things can sometimes have a profound affect.

Kirsty Dunphey is the youngest ever Australian Telstra Young Business Woman of the Year, author of two books (her latest release is Retired at 27, If I Can do it Anyone Can) and a passionate entrepreneur who started her first business at age 15 and opened her own real estate agency at 21. Now Kirsty does lots of fun things which you can read about here. Her favourite current projects are Elephant Property, a boutique property management agency, Baby Teresa, a baby clothing line that donates an outfit to a baby in need for each one they sell and ReallySold, which helps real estate agents stop writing boring, uninteresting ads.