"I have always liked what I have done," says Stuart McFaul. "I started my career in PR and marketing and have really enjoyed it. Early on, I had written down what my goals were in the field, and carried them around in my wallet for years. At 27, I had reached all the goals, and realized that the more artistic part of me wanted to be satisfied."

In college, Start wanted to pursue interior and architectural design, but it seemed too frivolous. Now possessing greater confidence and self-knowledge, he decided to pursue this interest, and went back to college at night. For almost five years, he worked full time and spent nights and weekends studying.

Armed with his new degree, Stuart went to work for two top-notch San Francisco designers. It was heady stuff; the team designed the house of Tina Turner, another house that appeared in Architectural Digest, and worked on big projects with multi-million dollar budgets.

"Despite appearances," Stuart confesses, "It was a total hand to mouth existence. The designers were spending every damn penny on the outward trappings of the design industry... a fancy house, nice clothes, and the like.

"The only people in this field who actually had money were wives of investment bankers or trust fund babies. I had to ask whether I wanted to live like this. I loved the work, but mostly only when I was executing my vision, which was not necessarily the vision my client had."

Two years into his new career, Stuart went through a vocal debate with friends who could not believe he had invested so many years to switch careers and now was considering "throwing it all away."

"My attitude the whole time was that I gained a lot. In the normal marketing world, you deal with a two-dimensional world. In the design world, you are compelled to think in three dimensions.

"This forces you to look at things differently. How could you use a table, other than just stick it in the middle of a room? Can you saw off the legs? Can it be off to the side? Can it become a light fixture? You are continually compelled to look at things not as they are, but as they could be. You have to deal with space, color, and texture. If you are upholstering a chair and client likes the fabric but it does not work, you can turn fabric over and the reverse side might work. You become hardwired to look at things this way.

"What I decided to do was to go back into marketing, because my experiences reframed how I thought about marketing."

So Stuart reversed his earlier career change and went back into his old field, but with a new mindset. He loved it, and again enjoyed success. So much so that he decided to start a firm of his own. But first, he forced himself to decide what he really, truly wanted to do. Not just what field he wanted to be in, but what he wanted.

Armed with a box full of notes and goals he had written to himself over his lifetime, Stuart traveled alone to Paris and sat in cafes. He wrote various ideas, thoughts and mission statements on paper, rejecting one after another.

Finally, after a week of introspection, Stuart wrote down the mission he took home... help nice people be successful.

He came home and in 1997 founded Spiralgroup, a marketing and public relations firm. In 2001, Success Magazine selected the firm as one of their Top 100 companies.

"Those five words... help nice people be successful... have been immeasurably valuable in guiding us not only to seek out the right type of clients, but they have also motivated us to broaden our services beyond what I originally intended. When a client we sincerely want to help says this is what I need to be successful and we do not offer the service, whenever feasible we have figured out a way to expand our offerings and give them what they need."