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Terry Opalek is a longtime journal writer. He'd write sporadically, mostly as a way to mark time, until he attended a workshop called "The Artist's Way" that used the book by the same name to incorporate the journaling process to unleash creativity. Then he began to write each day, calling them "morning pages." It was during this solitary time, writing "to excavate organically his heart's desire," that he began to conceive what became a wildly successful confection business, eponymously named Terry's Toffee, in Chicago.

"What came out of pages and pages of journaling," Opalek says, "was 'leave your job'." At the time, he was 45 and director of membership development for the California Chamber of Commerce. In the eyes of the world he was a success. "I wasn't particularly unhappy," he says. "The money was incredible and I never even had to leave my house." Yet he knew he wasn't stretching himself. "I remember the feeling so well. I was regurgitating the same information over and over so that I felt like a tape loop." Another signpost was that his stepfather of 30 years was dying. "He married my mom at my age and I thought, ‘Is this all there is?'"

A few months before quitting his job Opalek and Michael Frontier, his partner in business and life who had recently left the restaurant business, decided to make a few extra bucks by participating in a church holiday bazaar. They made about 80 boxes of Opalek's grandmother McCall's toffee, the recipe for which he reclaimed from the family archives.

Curious to see if lightning might strike twice, Opalek experimented with spices and extracts and learned how to temper chocolate over the next year. His sales and marketing background facilitated his goal. Communicating his plans to designers, he developed a logo, experimented with packaging and took steps to launch a web site. "I decided from the beginning that my market was going to be upscale," he says. "And that I was going to target my generation, the baby boomers. The sophistication of the flavors and the high-end packaging followed suit to manifest my intentions."

Soon he was selling to gourmet shops in and around Chicago, and the press came knocking. Astonishment is still evident in Opalek's voice. "I never even had a business plan," he says. One could argue that much of a plan was systematically scribbled into stacks of coffee-stained composition books via his journaling. But Opalek's focus wasn't on numbers. "It's not even about the toffee," he says. "It's about the excitement of using my creativity to make something happen. The brain cells are firing and I literally feel like what I've developed is the grey matter."

His grandmother's recipe also recreated a primal connection. "I felt there had been some fragmentation in our family," he says. "Remembering holiday time, when everyone was together, I felt such love. I wanted to connect to that energy."

As Opalek contemplates the challenges and hard work of growing a business, he wants others to know the benefits of putting pen to paper. "I feel more authentic than I've ever felt, and I believe the more people who know that feeling, the more we'll create a world with less negativity and anger." Those will be the people who find the toffee of life. Sweet.

If you enjoyed this profile you might want to read the feature article on Barbara Wahler entitiled, The Joys of Getting Fired.