Start Something That Matters
Sometimes your dreams for living a great life and having more personal freedom can seem so far away. Yet, no matter where you are on the path, never let your small beginnings make you small-minded. When people express that your ambitions are impossible, keep going. When your dreams don’t come true instantaneously, remember it is through struggle, effort and desire that you get from here to there.
Following your dreams isn’t foolish; what’s foolish is not believing in your dreams and following other peoples’ path instead of your own. You become who you want to become by enacting habits that move you forward every day. The choices and practices you make in life are the building blocks that build a better reality.
Often, you don’t even know what’s possible until you’ve marched towards your dream; only with momentum does the path reveal itself and the goal get clearer. Epiphanies come as you move toward something that matters.
Never let your current conditions or circumstances limit your vision or actions. Never let your current skill set limit your belief of what is possible for you or what you’re capable of. Wherever you are today, you can develop new habits to get you to your dream.
Success and fulfillment come from your unflagging ability to believe in what other people call impossible. Chase your dreams, believe in yourself and you will start to experience incredible levels of engagement and enthusiasm with life. No matter how small you start, start something that matters. Soon, you will begin to experience what we call The Charged Life!
FULL TRANSCRIPT: Hey guys, it’s Brendon and I’m standing near the entrance way of my Writers’ Villa, the place where I come to write all my books. I wrote, The Motivation Manifesto here, The Charge: Activating the 10 Human Drives That Make You Feel Alive.
This is sort of my dream place to write and as I’m shuffling about today, thinking about my next book, responding to some of you guys’ messages and comments, and just thinking about the blessing that I have to be here today and get to do this work.
I just want to share a simple message with you today and that is: never let your current conditions or circumstances limit your vision or your actions.
So many of us, we have a big dream, we have a big goal and because it seems impossible or seems so far away from what today is. When we’re struggling through the day, working to make it, trying to figure out our stuff, just trying to respond to everybody and make all the magic happen during the day.
Sometimes that big goal, that big dream, that thing that is even bigger than we actually ever consciously thought of, that aspiration and ambition we have for living a good life or having more personal freedom, it feels so far away when we’re just trapped in the box of the day.
And what I want to say to you is no matter where you are and accomplishing your dreams or moving towards the things that you really want in life, never let your small beginnings make you small-minded.
It’s easy to say, “Well, that’s impossible” and I know lots of people are telling you that, “That’s impossible.”
You know how many people told me what I’m doing today is impossible? “Brendon, you want to be a writer? You can’t write. Brendon, you want to be a trainer? You want to be a speaker? You want to do YouTube videos? You’re not good on video, you’re not good at this; you are not good at this. It’s impossible. Oh, you don’t understand how hard it is to make it, Brendon. It’s so hard these days.”
The stuff that people tell me and I know have told you is so nonsensical and based on so many of their own fears that have been unexplored, that it’s sad. And it can really cause great people to stop trying to do great things.
So, I want to encourage you no matter where you are, believe in yourself.
Keep at it. Keep working. Keep going.
I mean success and fulfillment are going to come from your unflagging ability to believe in what other people call impossible.
It’s going to come from your unflagging ability to get up each day and work towards things that
Maybe you don’t know where they’re going. Maybe they’re not getting you what you want right in a way. Maybe it’s not easy. Maybe it is a struggle. But it is through that struggle and that effort and that dream and the desire that you get there. I never thought I’d be saying, “here I am in a writer’s villa.” To have the abundance and the blessing in my life to be able to get a place pretty much for the sole purpose of me going there to write. That’s big and beautiful and larger than any home I have ever lived in - out in the country in the wood-side. It’s an unbelievable gift and blessing.
But I don’t forget where it all came from. The first place I wrote, you wouldn’t call it a villa. You would call it a box.
It was my childhood bedroom that was like, I don’t know, 8 feet by 10 feet maybe? And I wrote on my mother’s fold out three-legged table, on a borrowed laptop, and I had no idea what I was doing, no hope, no reason, no person saying, “hey Brendon, you can do this.”
I just wanted to write.
I wanted to write this first book. This is my first big book: Life’s Golden Ticket. I was writing a novel. This is a parable, kind of like The Alchemist. This is a story about a guy undergoing dramatic transformation.
I had no idea how to do it. I’d never written fiction. I had to go to Barnes&Noble, buy books on fiction and see how they did quotation marks and how did they break up conversation between characters because I had never been taught that. I never had a writer’s class, never went to writer’s conferences. I had no reason to believe I could do it.
I just felt called to do it. I felt like I was supposed to share some good messages with the world and I just went for it.
And everybody told me, “Well, you’re stupid and this is going to cost you all these things.”
But everyone feels like their job is to tell you that you’re stupid and I think stupidity really comes in ignorance and the inability to believe in oneself.
That what’s stupid is not to try to move toward your dreams. What is stupid is to be culturally conditioned in a way of behaving or doing things just because everybody else is doing it. What’s stupid is following other people’s decisions or following other people’s path because you feel like you’re supposed to not because you want to. When we become trapped in our busy work and not fulfilling our life’s work, that’s when life becomes miserable.
So, I just started writing and the truth is I don’t, wasn’t very good at first. I didn’t know what I was doing. I wasn’t blessed in some way to wake up one day and I’m like, “I’m a writer.”
I became a writer by every day saying, “I want to do that.”
And every day sitting down and punching out a few pages or punching out a few paragraphs.
You become who you want to become by every day living that.
By every day enacting habits that move you towards that.
You want to become a basketball player? You play basketball every day. You want to become healthier? You do something that gets you healthier every day. These are choices and decisions and disciples that we set up in our lives and I know you know that but it’s so easy to call your dreams or your ambitions “out of reach” or “impossible” because that’s what they’re going to tell you.
And I’m just here to say, there are things in your life that you don’t even know are possible until you’ve marched towards them for a few months, or a few years.
I had no idea any of this was possible. I didn’t even know how to get an agent. I didn’t know how to get a publisher. There was no program called Expert’s Academy back then to tell you, well how do you do all this.
I just started. I just started marching towards it.
No one ever told me I could have a dream place to write like this. It was the progress that was happening.
Sometimes, the real ambitions, the real fulfillment opens up to you as you are marching towards your dreams. The path reveals. The goal gets clear. But it’s only in momentum that things become more clear.
Sitting down and thinking and guessing there’s not going to be an epiphany there.
The epiphanies come from motion.
From moving towards something even if it’s just like exploring the world in some random way. The gate opens up and you see where you’re supposed to go.
I didn’t know that one day I would be doing videos. I wasn’t like, I sat down, “I want to be a YouTube star.” And now, 30 million people watched me in the last 12 months on YouTube. You know…it wasn’t part of the past. It was, I was writing, I was sharing my story and people started saying, “Hey, you should share some videos. This is inspiring stuff. It kept me on my path, Brendon.”
I said, “Okay.” I had to learn how to do video. I was awfully awkward at it. This was not easy for me. It was not comfortable at all. I had to learn how to be a speaker. I didn’t know how to do that. I was scared of talking to people.
But what I did is I didn’t limit my belief in what was capable or possible for me based on my skill set today.
Your skill set today has nothing to do with whether or not you can accomplish your future dream. But what does matter is the skill sets you need to start acquiring to get there.
Wherever you are at today, you can develop new habits, new routines, new disciples, new mentors, new friends, new social circles, new daily routines to get you to that dream.
But at the beginning, you need sit and say, “I need to stop believing that I can’t because it seems impossible.” Everything is impossible the first time. But as you start moving towards it, it gets more possible. You get that … you start hiking up the Kilimanjaro, it’s impossible at the base but you get up a mile, you get up two, you get up three and it’s just all of a sudden you’re like, “Wait a second, there’s something here. Maybe it could happen for me. ”
And so, I just want to say, I know you got big dreams and big goals and desires, and as I’m standing here just taking in this magic of this place and the energy that it gives me, I just hope that you get that. I hope that one day, you end up in a place where you’re like, “Gosh, I feel so blessed to be here.”
And I know you probably already feel that in some way every day. But there’s another level that comes in that fulfillment when you’ve achieved a major dream.
When you know, you’re never complete and you will always have bigger dreams, always more things to chase, better things to give, more ways to grow, but when you really achieve something significant for yourself and you get the moment to say, “You know, I’m really glad I started.” That brings a great level of joy.
So, what are you going to start today? What are you going to start moving towards? What skills do you need to go and acquire? How can you get back in the game, back in motion? How can you allow yourself to believe again in the impossible and know that it only becomes possible with motion? Believe me, I know how hard it is to believe in yourself and sometimes you think you need permission to go out and do something. So, if you’re waiting for permission.
BAM!
There you’ve just been given it by the universe to go chase your dream, to go try that impossible thing. Believe in yourself. Start moving towards it and you’ll start to experience an incredible amount of energy, engagement and enthusiasm with life. What we call, The Charged Life.
So, I’m just here today to remind you this is the simplest thing. No matter how small you start, start something that matters.
Source:Â Start Something That Matters