I’m going to start by quoting a good friend of mine, Mike Blissett*, who played a major part in my being where I am today. One of his recent tweets reads “Dreams don’t work unless you do.”
Quite a few people I know will get sick of hearing that from me over the next twelve months, because it is SO true. The people I know who are successful (either by their own definition or by mine) are so because they DO the work. The people I know who are not successful (by their own definition, mine doesn’t matter) are not so, because they DON’T.
There are no ifs, buts or maybes to that. It is an absolute fact. Even winning the lottery is only possible if you buy the ticket.
In most areas of life, for those of us wanting to live a happy, ethical and meaningful life, it takes a little more effort than buying the ticket. Or rather, ‘buying the ticket’ is a bit more of a complicated process.
If you want to be a successful musician, for example, buying the ticket means learning the instrument, being creative in your use of it and continuing to refine or expand your repertoire, all the hours of rehearsal, doing the non-paying, low-paying gigs, picking yourself up when no-one shows up or you don’t get paid or the show went badly or actually went well but got bad reviews anyway. It means the slog of going on tour. The agonising over contracts. The getting ripped off and getting over it and negotiating better or finding someone more trustworthy next time around. ‘Buying the ticket’ means committing to the slog, making the mistakes, relishing the lucky breaks and recognising them for what they are. And likewise recognising the bad breaks for what they are and leaving them behind.
In fact, if you want to be any kind of creative success, the roadmap isn’t much different. You have to learn the craft, you have to put in the hours, refine your skills & techniques, hone your talent. You have to find ways of putting the work into the world – paid-for or otherwise depending upon your own personal definition of success.
And if you want to be a success in any other field…really, does it differ that much? If you want to be a hot-shot lawyer or run the best teashop in town…you have to do the work.
Some other wise person once said: There are no short cuts to anywhere worth going.
Those of my friends, who I love dearly anyway, who I watch not living their dreams frustrate me in the degree to which they’re opting out of the work and (in some cases) then declining to be accountable for not being successful. Whenever anyone worries to me that they ‘might be wasting their life’, I have to bite my tongue – because if that thought plays in, then they probably are.
Either they’re not doing the work – or they’re not doing the right work.
One of my favourite pieces on my vision board is a photograph I took about a decade ago now: a small fishing boat on the Mekong, at sunset. The words I’ve added are: do the work that matters.
We get to decide what that work is, whether we want to run a multi-national corporation or just
bring home enough fish for supper, but we still have to get up and actually do it.
In my head, anything that we do that is directly related to our personal definition of success, to “the dream”, whatever our dream might be, is a good use of our time, energy and resources. Anything which isn’t, isn’t.
We don’t necessarily need to be moving forward. Sometimes we have to move sideways, or even backwards, in order to go forwards. But we do need to think about our deployment of our time, energy and resources. The degree to which we’re dissipating them on irrelevances, is the degree to which we will fail to get to where we want to go.
Time. Energy. Resources. That’s it. That’s all we have at our disposal. There is nothing else. Of course, ‘resources’ is something of a catch-all bucket. It includes all the practical stuff & equipment, finances, people who can help, workshops & learning opportunities, public facilities, private facilities that we might be able to access, our homes and families and support networks, and it also includes all of our intangibles such as our skills, talents, intelligence, memories, curiosity, persistence, willingness to learn.
I’m not saying that we ‘use’ all of those things all of the time to a single end.
Unless that end is our ‘dream life’.
In which case, I am saying precisely that. Because in our dream life, whether we’ve yet recognised it or not, having families and friends (however you define them), contributing to the wider world (however you define that), feeling connected (ditto) all play a role. So giving our time, energy & resources to those things, does support the goal of living the dream. It won't make us financially richer or move our career or creative ambitions forward, but it does still support the dream, because the dream includes that kind of stuff. Doesn't it?
For most of us, some form of work, also plays a role. That might be a career, it might be raising a family, or supporting a partner, it might be something we define as ‘service’ or as ‘soul work’. We might call it volunteering or mentoring the next generation. Whatever it is, most of us know that we don’t want to spend our days in idleness.
At the same time, idleness has its place…we can have (MUST have) our downtime, our relaxation,
our not-doing, just being, our playing. That too, surely, feeds into most of our definitions of our ‘dream life’.
You can see where this is leading. In order to have our ‘dream life’ we first have to know what that is. I have a personal theory that everyone knows what that is for them, even those who say they don’t know what they want. I have a personal theory that anyone who says they don’t know what they want, is just too scared to admit what it is.
I might be wrong, but I think the main reasons for that are:
- They don’t think it’s possible
- They don’t think they deserve it
- They might get there and find they were wrong, that it doesn’t give them what they thought
it would and now they want something else
My responses to that are:
- It might not be, but if you give it your best shot, you’ll get closer than if you don’t
- You do
- Maybe so, but then you get to change your mind – and all the stuff you learned along the
way will still be relevant to whatever new direction you choose to go in.
So. We’re a week into 2024 and I’m thinking it is time to stop reflecting on the past and start embracing the present with a view to the future. What does your dream life look like? What can you do today, to get you one step closer?
I was having a bad day yesterday, emotionally speaking, and those questions found their way into my Morning Pages. I realised that if I did anything – anything at all – it would be a step in the right direction. And that’s because I’m already living my dream life.
Not my perfect life – there are gaps and improvements needed – but the life in which I have stepped away from everything that does not serve the dream. I have stepped away from relationships that took more than they gave (over a sustained period of time). I have left a career that had outlived its ability to motivate and reward me. I have accepted the losses that cannot be replaced. I have figured out what spirituality means to me. I have found new passions, new ambitions and aspirations, and ways to work towards them, and compensations for their limitations.
I know where I am, I know where I want to be, I know what needs to be done. And most of my time, energy & resources go in that direction. Not all – I have bad days, lazy days, not-able-to-cope days – we all do.
And sometimes I too need the reminders: to stop and actually look at my vision board! I have a friend who, I have just recognised, spends more time looking at it than I have been doing. Note to self: pause & look! Remember what you’ve committed to!
When I do that, I smile, get excited again and go take the next step. And it is always that next step that makes the magic happen.
Here’s a thing: even in the realms of magic, of wizards and witches and fairy-godmothers and genies, there are apprenticeships to be served. There is learning to be acquired, practice to be done. The magic never happens by itself. To make the magic happen, you have to wave the wand, make the potion, or say the words. And you have to learn them and practice them. You have to do the work.
Me too!
Find Mike at www.mikeblissett.com and on Twitter (!) as @mikeblissett
