Go After What You Want

If you ask people what they consider success to look like, the answers are often things like money, a big house, maybe even fame or being an influential figure. But these are about living the dream, not about success.

Success is something we experience every day of our lives. You got out of bed this morning, success! Your car started when you went to work, success! You made it through the weekend with your 3 children without any any blood on the walls, success!

I think there's a difference between living the dream and success. You see you can be successful without a dream, but you can’t live the dream without being successful.

We can be successful everyday but never go anywhere in life, it just becomes a routine for the same daily successes. It is this that creates the comfort zone and once we fall into that complacency trap it can be a hard rut, but not impossible, to get out.

Opportunities come and go, some hang around a long time other are gone almost as quickly as they came. Some are obvious and smack us in the face other are so subtle that you don’t have time to think, you need to live on your instincts. Something else that’s important, when an opportunity arises, do you see the opportunity and how it can advance you towards your dream or do you see the obstacle?

Going after what you want means that opportunities may not look right for what you are aiming for. They may not make sense and just don’t fit into the dream you have, so you choose to pass on the opportunity and then spend a long time waiting for the ‘right opportunity’ to come a long. But you have to realise that some of the opportunities come round to help us progress towards the dream by teaching us new skills, seeing things in a certain way or it could be about temperament and emotions.

Success is rented and the rent is due every day, many people know what they want in life, they have this vision of their dream and they go after it but keep missing. You have this picture of a dream, but what does it look like? How are you going to pay rent daily on that dream? If its a house you’re after, how are you going to keep it clean? Who’s going to do the shopping and cooking? If its business, who is going to work for you? How will you set prices? Where will your customers come from? These questions seems trivial, but if they can’t be answered now, then maybe you don’t know what it is you want.

Another reason for not go after what we want is the the amount of work and effort involved. Especially when we’re in job we are not really interested in, but it pays the bills. Its long hours so when we finish and have time off all we want is to relax and spend time with our family. Our daily successes become nothing more then a monotonous routine. We go round pretending we’re OK and happy with life because it’s far easier then having to explain what we really want and why we’re not there.

We all have just one life, and we all have the right to make what we want of it, I think in the wake of the unprecedented times of 2020 this next part of this article is very appropriate, even more so if you lost your job due to the lockdowns, or you are on less income now then you were before the pandemic.

We’re never too old to start something new, nor to chase that dream we’ve always wanted. They say that new year is the excuse for new beginnings. So why not take this new year and create the life you want by going after things you want. Take time to think about it, find images on the internet or in magazines and catalogues, print them off, cut them out and create a dream wall so you always have sight of your goals, keep adding and updating them.

Start small by looking at what you are currently doing, find your daily successes, then build on them. The more new successes you have the closer you will come to achieving what you need. Take every opportunity that comes your way, even if at first it doesn’t fit, enjoy the experience and find things to learn from them.

Finally be creative in your approach to getting what you want, we live in a world where there are ‘normal’, ‘socially accepted’ or ‘conventional’ ways to do things, break the rules, not the law, the rules. Because everyone is entitled to have what they want, and we’re all entitled to go after things the way we want too, as long as it doesn’t stop someone else getting what they want.

Its important that you keep visual of your dream, if you don’t you will only see obstacles and that is what holds you back.