Sometimes it seems like the world is conspiring against you. Or at the very least, conspiring against your goals.
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If I came back from the future and told you that in the next 12 months you would need to launch a spaceship into outer space to ensure the survival of humanity...what would you do?
After you got over the shock of having time-travel confirmed (or called the police to have my mental state evaluated), there's only one thing to do.
You begin to plan.
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After the ball dropped and my wife and I sat sipping Bellinis at home to celebrate (watch out we get crazy), we talked about our plans for the new year. It was a good moment, one in which we discussed not only what we wanted individually, but also as a couple.
Later that night, as I sat in bed thinking about the year ahead and reminiscing about the year gone by, I started to wonder: Was there something I wanted to get done in 2016 that I didn't do?
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Do you have a dream?
Most people have a dream of where they think they'd like to be in 5, 10, or 20 years. Something that they are aspiring to, something they are working towards, some place they want to see themselves in.
That dream is probably a bit of a stretch goal, not really something that is achievable overnight. There are probably more than a few steps in between here and there.
One thing I often ask myself and others is, "What is actually holding you back?"
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We’ve all heard the advice, “Work Smart not Hard.” At its core, the saying focuses on the topic of effective effort. Effective effort can be summed up as making sure that you are work towards your actual goal and not just working to get stuff done.
Working smart is not enough to achieve your goal.
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I'm always advocating for people to "do something". If you have a goal in mind, get started. I can't tell you how many people I've met who have dreams and aspirations of things they want to get done, and yet never seem to gain much ground on them.
People get caught up in the planning stage. In the "I need to know everything first" stage. Most people will tell you from experience that your plans will immediately be rearranged. No amount of planning will prepare you for the real deal.
While I don't advocate for just jumping into something without giving it a second though, waiting forever won't do much for you either.
At some point you need to stop adding to your list of "I should do this" and start adding to the "I did this" list.
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Over the next three weeks, I’ll be discussing some of the best practices for achieving success in your professional careers. While I don’t think that incorporating your passions into your career is necessary, I know that a lot of us (myself included) do want to do just that. So to that end, I’m going to share some of the key elements to make that happen, preparing you to reach your goals, whatever they may be.
Success. It's what we’re all supposed to strive for, and yet there are countless definitions of what that means. It could be related to financial, status, impact, happiness, or any number of other goals. Even if you ask two people what financial success looks like, one might say a million dollars in the bank and another might say a billion. There’s no one definition and there shouldn’t be.
Regardless of what you consider being successful means, the truth is we all want to reach it. We all want our lives to have meant something and to have moved at least some version of our dreams outside of our heads and into the real world. But if we want to do that, to bring our dreams to fruition, to build our careers to new heights, it’s incredibly important to ask yourself this question: “What does success mean to me?”
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I took the last few weeks to take a step back and look at passion from the eyes of someone who really feels lost in their search. After writing about passion for over a year, I sometimes take for granted where people are in their journey. And for a lot of people, their search begins with the phrase, "Follow Your Passion."
When it comes to your passion, there are a number of things you can do to use it, but with the vague advice of “Follow Your Passion” floating around, it's easy to feel disappointed and lacking in ability.
"If it's that easy to live a wonderful life, how come I can't do it?"
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"You don't set out to build a wall. You don't say 'I'm going to build the biggest, baddest, greatest wall that's ever been built.' You don't start there. You say, 'I'm going to lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid.' You do that every single day. And soon you have a wall."
-- Will Smith
This is one of the quotes I live by, and I've thought about it almost every day since I heard it.
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Motivational speaker Jim Rohn has been quoted as saying that we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. While I'm not quite sure what an "average of a person" is, I get that he is referring to the general habits and behaviors that we exhibit.
If you've ever seen someone spend time with an old friend and begin to act similar to them, you've see the influence we can have on each other.
While this can be easily seen as a downside (teenagers and their ill-behaved friends are a classic example), it can also be used for positive actions.
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"I want my dream and I want it now."
That's really what we're saying when we rush to complete something we're passionate about in hopes of becoming successful.
I'm all for working very hard on what we're passionate about, but along the way there are bound to be hiccups and missteps. People will get in the way or plans won't work quite as well as they should have. It's going to happen.
Achieving dreams and building success from that desire to work a passion will take time. And unfortunately that's probably going to take more time than you think.
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