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Make Things Happen Instead of Wanting Them to Happen Before Life Passes You By

Do or do not

By Darryl BrooksPublished 3 years ago 4 min read
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Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

We all want things to happen.

We want to know things, to have things, and to go places.

And we all spend time fantasizing about these things. We think about how it will be to know that thing or to have those things or to go to those places.

We want these things to happen.

But they never will.

Unless you do the things you need to do to make them happen.

That’s the difference between living your life and living your life in your head.

If you want things to happen, you have to make them happen. If you’re just going to sit around and wish for good things, you may as well stop reading this right now and buy yourself a lottery ticket.

Or just throw some money out the window. It will be quicker, and you will get the exact same results.

But since you are still here reading this, I assume you actually want to make things happen rather than just wish for them.

So, let‘s get started.

As most of my loyal readers know, I recently bought a guitar. I started watching videos of lessons and guitarists playing songs I wanted to learn. There was one musician in particular that got me interested in playing solo classical style guitar. I watched many of his videos and lessons.

He would pick up the guitar and put the fingers of his right hand on the strings over the soundhole. He would put the fingers of his left hand on the strings of the fretboard. And then both hands would move in unison, producing beautiful melodies. It was so simple.

So, I picked up my guitar and put the fingers of my right hand on the strings over the soundhole. I put the fingers of my left hand on the strings of the fretboard. And then I moved both hands. But they were not in unison. And I made some random noises.

The problem is, I missed the part before he picked up his guitar. The part where he got his first guitar as a child and studied classical for ten years and earned a degree in Classical Guitar when he was 20. The part where he moved to a different city and studied electric guitar for another five years at a private school. Then he moved to another town and taught classical guitar for another ten years.

So, let’s see, twenty-five years vs. three months.

I wrote in another article how to learn and improve. There were two principles in that article: finding someone better than you and getting back to basics.

So, I have done both. I began learning one note at a time on one string at a time. And while I was doing that, I started watching his most basic videos and trying to learn one of his songs.

One note at a time on one string at a time.

Because that is the way you make something happen rather than wanting something to happen.

I’ve been writing for sixteen years, and I am quite happy with my current success. I read posts on Facebook and Twitter from people who can’t form sentences wanting to know how they can make money writing. They aren’t thrilled with my three-step process.

  • Learn to Write
  • Write
  • A lot

Sixteen years ago, I wrote a letter to the editor of a local newspaper. It got printed along with my name, and that made me want to earn money from writing. Within several months, I was bringing in as much as $10 from one of my stories. That was after writing dozens of stories and articles and submitting them everywhere I could think of. I kept at it, and sixteen years and hundreds of articles later, I am making decent money from writing.

Because that is the way you make something happen rather than wanting something to happen.

I am also a professional photographer. Around the same time that I wrote that letter to the editor, I had just gotten a new camera. I took a few pictures of a seashell and submitted them to several stock agencies.

The next day, I earned twenty-five cents. That money has grown exponentially every day since then, and now I have a portfolio of over 50,000 images and make decent money from my photography. Fifty thousand images shot, processed, uploaded, and offered for sale over sixteen years.

Because that is the way you make something happen rather than wanting something to happen.

We are retired now. We dreamed of this day almost from the start. But we did more than dream about it. We made it happen. We made it happen by being frugal, saving often, and investing wisely. We made it happen through 35 years of hard work and sacrifice.

I have a niece who is doing much better than we did at her age. But her McMansion is mortgaged to the hilt, and she just bought her fourth new car in as many years so she can pick her kid up at private school in style.

She may never retire. She may dream about it. She may think about it happening one day. But as long as she keeps spending every nickel she makes, and then some, that day may never come.

Because that is not the way you make something happen rather than wanting something to happen.

That is the way you become a life-long dreamer.

So, if you want to make something happen rather than just dream about it, you need to learn all the steps in getting there.

And then you have to take all of those steps one at a time.

You have to learn one note on one string.

You have to take a single photograph.

You need to put ten bucks in a jar on your shelf and leave it there.

Because that is the way you make something happen rather than wanting something to happen.

how to
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About the Creator

Darryl Brooks

I am a writer with over 16 years of experience and hundreds of articles. I write about photography, productivity, life skills, money management and much more.

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