Following Your Dreams: Recognizing the Defining Moment

Yesterday I lived a life completely different from the life I lead today. The difference is, I’m learning faster.

The natural progression of life consists of a series of thoughts and dreams, accumulated over time and actualized by the self. Once you can envision your aspirations becoming reality, the only thing stopping you is you.

Your mind is your greatest asset. If you don’t truly believe in yourself and your convictions, the universe will wait for you to believe before actuating them. Life is a game of challenges that never ends. When you die, you’ll have 50 things you still needed to do, should have done, or wanted to do. You simply can’t do everything. Your decisions are yours alone and life won’t wait for you to weigh all the options.

I’ve began to realize many things about success and business, I had no choice but to share them with you.

The key to success is to be happy. The key to life is to Love.

If you love who you are, it shows. When you love what you do, you’ll work tirelessly to perfect your craft. When your work is a labor of love, you’ll feel as if you never worked a day in your life.

The greatest way to experience Love is to share it.

I am fulfilled by helping somebody follow their dreams. Helping them succeed. To do for them what others have done for me. To reach out at every opportunity to leave the world a better place than it was when I got here.

When our final day in this flesh vehicle comes to be, the universe will open our minds to all its secrets.

"Don’t waste your time living somebody else’s life." – Steve Jobs

When you follow your dreams, there will be a defining moment you’ll never forget.

You may not have experienced it yet, but if you have you’ll know exactly where I’m coming from.

There will be a moment you look back on everything you have ever done. You’ll remember every time you worked late, every success and every failure, every second you poured into building your dream as you had always envisioned it. You’ll look around you and you’ll look at yourself. You’ll look at what your life has become and what path you willingly decided to take.

And then, you'll cry.

In these tears of doubt lie the true seeds of success. Because at that moment you’ll be faced with a make or break decision that will alter the trajectory of your life and lay the foundation for your true existence.

It was somewhere around 5am in 2010. I had been up all night working on a website, trying desperately as I have for as long as I could remember, to build my business into what I had always dreamed of.

All of the sudden, I stopped. I looked around. I looked in the mirror. I looked at my unorganized desk and my messy bedroom. I looked at the deflated air mattress I’d been sleeping on for 4 months. I thought of my nearly empty bank account. I looked out the window at the beautiful palm trees swaying in the wind and back at myself in my tiny, dusty bedroom.

I said out loud, "what the f__ are you doing?". You’ve wasted the last 10 years of your life working for something you’ll never achieve. You’ve wasted your time, your body, your talent, your potential, your mind, your money, for this. And what do you have to show for it?

Then I cried.

I pounded my fists on my desk, put my head in my hands and cried. I thought about my brother, how much I missed the time we spent together and how I wished I could ask him what to do. I felt alone. I thought about giving up.

I won’t tell you that I heard him, I won’t tell you that I spoke to him, I won’t tell you that I know exactly what happened, but after all of my self-doubt boiled over into a self-loathing soup I had never before tasted, my mind went blank and I could only hear one thing.

"Do it."

It wasn’t until many moons later that I realized this may have been the most important moment of my career. For at that moment, I had reached the bottom.

I awoke later that day with the saltiness of tears still on my face but an entirely new vision of what needed to be done. I wasn’t going to give up this easily. I wasn’t going to give up if it was the last thing I do. I’d come too far, for too long, I’d put in every ounce of my heart into this and I wasn’t going to just give up without dying for it.

For it is at your weakest moment, your greatest moment of self-doubt, when you feel you have completely failed and there is no hope left; at that very moment the decision you make will be the most important. The decision to pursue your personal legend no matter time nor money nor effort required will be the defining moment of who you really are. And it is then and only then will you realize if you can wipe away the tears, get back up and work harder.

Only you can make yourself, and this is when you’ll realize if you have what it takes.

Originally Written in 2012