014: What is your dream and WHY aren’t you living it???

I approach everything in life similar to the way I approach business. One of my cardinal rules as an entrepreneur is to avoid working IN a business so much that I stop working ON it. For example, if you have a bakery, you don’t want to be the one who is baking, doing accounting, and sales at the same time. If you do that, you become too busy to do anything else but daily tasks and, as a result, you become extremely myopic. It is important to be able to step out of your business and look into it once in a while. When you do that, some of the obvious glaring weaknesses or areas of needed improvement become obvious.

High wage earning professionals are often experts at the details but can’t see the proverbial forest for the trees. They are simply too busy to see anything else other than the next client, the next patient, or the next work day. There is essentially no time for introspection or evaluation of the most important asset than any one of us has: our lives.

When was the last time you stepped out of your life for a moment and looked at it critically? What were your dreams when you first started down this journey of “success”? What are they now? Why aren’t you living your dreams?

Now I’m not talking about the kinds of dreams that you know, for obvious reasons, will never happen. For example at 42 years old, 20 pounds overweight, and 3 spinal operations, I am pretty sure that I will never play in the NFL. Those are not the kinds of dreams to which I am referring.

I am referring to the dreams that I hear all the time from people around me. Some people want to live somewhere else. Some people want a different kind of job or want to start all over in another field. Others simply want to have more time with their children. It simply breaks my heart to see my hard working, high paid professional friends living like zombies with hopes of stockpiling enough cash away for the next 20 years to finally begin “living their dreams” in retirement.

Why not take take a moment to look at your own life critically? You may find that with a little introspection and a little bit more courage, that some of those “dreams” you have might be able to come to fruition sooner than you thought with some small but critical adjustments.