Think back as far as you can, do you remember your parents or teachers asking you the question, What do you want to be when you grow up? What was your answer back then? And more importantly are you doing what you've always wanted to do? Now don't get me wrong as you grow older and learn more about the world your views change on what you think is a good career and also what you want to accomplish in your life. They're not to many 25 year olds that still want to be a superhero (some but not many).
One of the things that amazes me about children is their ability to dream with their eyes open. All of us (including animals) dream when we go to sleep, but when we wake up we go back to "reality".
Children on the other hand are always dreaming, even after they wake up.
When you ask a child what he or she wants to be when they grow up, their answers can go anywhere from
a normal job (nurse,doctor) to an outrageous one (lion tamer,superman) but no matter what theres a level of confidence and certainty that when they get older that's what they'll be doing. And in a lot of cases theres no talking them out of it!
I had dinner with some friends the other night and we were talking about doing what you love every day in terms of a career. One of my friends has always wanted to be an umpire for major league baseball. At the moment he's working a regular 9 to 5, but when I saw his face light up as he talked about being an umpire I immediately thought, why aren't you doing this now? This is what you were meant to be!!
As we talked more about it I realized that as we get older we allow things to keep us from doing what we're passionate about. Not enough money, girlfriend/boyfriend doesn't agree with it, its to far away, what if I fail? These are all self imposed obstacles. We get in our own way. When we're younger we don't have any obstacles because we truly believe that we can do whatever we dream of.
So what do we do? We wait. We wait for the perfect situation to happen. We wait for all the stars to align to make sure theres a zero chance of failure. We wait to finally get out of our relationship with our boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife so we can start living the life we want. But what if its to late by then? What if the window of opportunity has already passed? Then what?
"Time will make dreams become memories act now"
Career wise I'm the luckiest man on the earth and every day I wake up I tell myself that. I get up and coach basketball and train kids everyday. When I was younger I didn't dream to be anything because I didn't find what I loved until my junior year of high school and that's when the "active dreaming" began. That's when I said to myself, I want to do basketball for the rest of my life. When you opened my notebooks there were pictures of a guy shooting hoops (mostly stick figures i cant draw to save my life) or just the word basketball and my jersey number.
I knew for a fact that I couldn't sit in an office all day and work. I wouldn't survive, I probably couldn't live more than a month that way. I think about coaching basketball and it's amazing to me how much money some of these upper echelon coaches make. Compared to these guys i've been doing my job for the last 7 years practically for free and I love every minute of it.
If bills weren't an option, could you wake up and do your job every day and live a happy and fulfilling life for free? Or would you get out of there so fast your name plate would still be on your desk as you sprinted towards the door?
"Waking up doesn't mean that your dreams are over, it just means that now you can physically work towards making them come true."
We over complicate enough things in our lives already, our dreams shouldn't be one of them
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