Tag: Project 365

What is your focus? Do you even have a focus? If you’re in your 20s or even 30s, heck maybe you are in your 40s. Honestly, regardless of what age you are, you might feel a lot of uncertainty all the time — you aren’t sure what your life purpose is, or your uncertain about what path you should take in life.

This is normal.

• We all want to know what our driving ambitions should be in life.
• We all want to have a certain life purpose.
• We all want to feel we’re on the right path.
• We all want to perfect our habits, our routines, our productivity.
• We all want to feel more certain, and perfect what we’re doing.

Let me let you in on a secret: no one is free from this struggle. Look at the most successful people you can think of — Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Obama, Taylor Swift. Do you think they have it all figured out? Do you think they have certainty and a feeling of reaching perfection? Not a chance. There is not one of us alive, not me or anyone else, whoever feels certainty about their purpose or path. If they do, they’re fooling themselves. But if they’re honest, they don’t feel that certainty.

No one ever feels they’ve found the perfect productivity routine, the perfect version of themselves … because it doesn’t exist.

You can’t know what the perfect path will be, you can’t know what the perfect you should be, you can’t know what your purpose in life is until it starts to uncover itself. You can’t know your destination until you get there. So instead of spinning your wheels with the unknowable, focus on what you actually have right in front of you.

“The heart is a muscle, and you strengthen muscles by using them. The more I lead with my heart, the stronger it gets.”  – Mark Miller

Photo Credit: Instagram @canva | Location: Unknown

If you can create, you can conquer too. Here is a reminder that success, happiness or the reality of dreams will take time, effort and a rough and windy road. The below will remind you there is going to be some hard work ahead – but if you want to see it through to the other side… then you need to conquer through. 

Most things in life don’t come easy. The sooner we understand this, the faster we’ll roll up our sleeves and get to work. Every single decision we make either propels us toward our dreams or away from them. Put one foot in front of the other in pursuit of your dreams.

Likewise, we shouldn’t let pain get the final say in our lives. Instead, we should use it to motivate us: Push harder, rise higher, and loosen pain’s deadly grip.

Take a page from Taylor Swift and just “shake it off” and people who do so are more likely to reach their goals than people who dwell on their problems. Which is why resiliency, the ability to bounce back, adjust, and cope with life’s disappointments is key to success.

Aspire for greatness, and don’t settle for less.

“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” – Les Brown

Photo Credit: Instagram @_clfurlong_ | Location: Noojee, Australia

As the final and 7th key to start living your dream – this one becomes the greatest of all and it all happens at the top of the mountain. 

It is all about when getting to the top of the mountain – keep climbing. As you rise to living my dream every time you think you have reached the peak, you should decide to keep going, and you will see how things end up even better than you possibly could have imagined. Even once you get to what you think is the top – there is no actual upper limit to what can be done in this world and you need to take full advantage of that as you push your way forward.

No matter what you do – as long as you maintain your honor and integrity it’s pretty hard to screw up badly enough that you get sent back to square one. Or come tumbling down a hill. There may be rests and breaks required and maybe even some route changes or doubling back to find a better path. But remember to always keep pushing and know that with this key and all the previous 6, that you might just be able to do something great!

Never measure the height of a mountain until you reach the top. Then you will see how low it was. – Dag Hammerskjold

Photo Credit: Instagram @canva | Location: Unknown

The journey is IMPORTANT! When it comes to key points and important factors of living your dream – or at least getting to the point where you are living your dream… This would have to be the most important.

At times you may feel like you’ve hit a brick wall and you’re not going to get any bigger. Remember to take a look around and realize “Huh, I’ve been able to do a lot to achieve my dreams” and you have managed to come this far… so there is still more to this journey. There are plateaus in everything you do, that’s how life works and of course, there will be highs! The trick is to embrace those plateaus as quiet times in between the madness that so often defines a day to day life. If you’re not enjoying the ride why bother?

 “The chase is better than the catch!” – Lemmy Kilmister

The desire to succeed and the journey that goes with it can be crippling. You reach those moments where you feel like everyone is against you and won’t let you reach the next level and you start to suffer or that you have failed before you have even really started. But here’s the thing – if you keep going people will respect you. If they see that even in a tight spot you kept your cool and decided to plow forward and not give up and did so with a smile on your face then they will know that you’re the real deal. In a world where you’ve got to fake it until you make it you might as well enjoy the madness and adventure along the way. 

“Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.” – Ernest Hemingway

Photo Credit: Instagram @canva | Location: Melbourne, Australia

Continuing on the keys to start living your dream – the next big thing following on from proving you want it the most is – while you’re on your journey you need to remember to be nice to everyone along the way…

Yes, everyone.

Be kind and respectful to everyone. This doesn’t mean being weak – you should be able to set limits – but it does mean that you should always be willing to help people and guide them forward. It means that you shouldn’t call people out on social media and it means that you should be very cautious before putting out any sort of controversial opinion into the public sphere. 

You don’t even have to be politically correct. What I’m saying is that you want to be real, genuine, transparent and down to earth. The biggest one is being approachable. If people are too scared to chat to you then you have a problem.  So be encouraging – give advice to people getting started and try to find mentors who also ascribe to this philosophy.

With this all in mind – When someone compliments you for anything – for your work, the way you did something, the way you said something or simply for the way you look, how do you react? Do you shrug it off and say ‘it was nothing’, ‘I am not sure why I was given this award’, I don’t deserve it’, ‘I just got lucky this time around’… all these are indicators of weakened confidence. Switch out that thinking and start accepting compliments graciously. When given a compliment learn to say thank you comfortably, thanking the person for recognizing your efforts and offering support. It is a display of belief in yourself which repeated consciously over a period of time begins to deeply seat itself in your mind leading to stronger levels of confidence.

“Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it’s all over.” – Gloria Naylor

Photo Credit: Instagram @_clfurlong_| Location: Melbourne, Australia

Key number 4 to start living your dream… You need to prove you want it the most.

It is a common happening that before you set off to chase a new goal or dream, that the people around you will decide to chip in and give their sense of worth and you will be surprised by how many will give negative feedback about the fact that what you were about to do has faults or this and that and will try to stop you. Now they may be right – however they may not be either.

In 1954, Elvis was still a no-name performer, and Jimmy Denny, manager of the Grand Ole Opry, fired Elvis Presley after just one performance telling him, ‘You ain’t goin’ nowhere, son. You ought to go back to drivin’ a truck.’ Elvis went on to become the second best-selling artists of all time.

The fact of the matter is that with concrete proof that you want something more than anyone else things will start to fall into place for you. There’s a difference between saying “I really want to live the rock and roll lifestyle” and “Here are 4,000 blog posts I’ve made about rock and roll”. You want this dream to become a reality, well you first need to work on it – you need to convince yourself and be proud of it. When it comes to society – you will be judged based on the concrete evidence of the work you’ve done. This is perhaps the hardest of these keys to pull off but it is also one of the most valuable.

Proving your journey to your dream, to yourself – won’t be done through the validation of others. It will only be done by your willingness and discipline to see it through to the end – regardless of the failures. 

For example: (provided by Sonia Thompson of Lifehack org)

Once James Dyson put his bagless Dyson G-Force vacuum cleaner on the market, it was an instant hit. Today, his company Dyson sells more than $2 billion in vacuums and other products.

The path to creating the hit vacuum cleaners was a long one. Dyson talks about why he didn’t give up during his 15-year pursuit of creating the perfect vacuum.

“There are countless times an inventor can give up on an idea. By the time I made my 15th prototype, my third child was born. By 2,627, my wife and I were really counting our pennies. By 3,727, my wife was giving art lessons for some extra cash. There were tough times, but each failure brought me closer to solving the problem. It wasn’t the final prototype that made the struggle worth it. The process bore the fruit. I just kept at it.”

Lesson:

Embrace failures as opportunities. Each failure brings a lesson that can get you closer to figuring out your optimal path to success.

How to make the lesson work for you:

With each failure, take the time to document what you did, what went wrong, and what you learned. Then use that information to guide your decision making to improve your next attempt.

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sail. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain

There you have it. So get out there and continue to explore, dream and discover!

Photo Credit: Instagram @_clfurlong_| Location: Melbourne, Australia

Photo Credit: Instagram @_clfurlong_| Location: Noojee Trestle Bridge Rail Trail, Australia

Photo Credit: Instagram @s.dem_ | Location: Greece

Photo Credit: Instagram @s.dem_ | Location: Greece