Some People Dream of Success, While Other People Make It Happen

Dreams are great! They can give you vision for the future and make you feel optimistic, but without planning and hard work, they’re worthless – mere wastes of time and mental energy. History is filled with people who wasted their lives fixin’ to do something but never quite getting past the fixin’ to part of making something happen.

Here are the seven ways to make your dream come true:

1. Realize it’s all about networking.

The formula is very basic: the more people you meet that are relevant to your dream, the closer you will get to achieving your dream. Being in the right room though is not enough. You’ll need to be gutsy and go and speak to them. What I haven’t told you so far is that I had to spend time in hundreds of rooms, with the wrong people, before I found the right people. Do you have that kind of patience young padawan?

2. Be relentless in your pursuit.

There will be days when it seems like you are a million miles away from your dream. You probably are too. Don’t let this destructive concept ruin your plans though. Unless you are prepared to keep on trying and never give up, you will fail. Miserably.To get in the right room, with the right person, took me over one year of trying to contact them. Every method I tried failed. Everyone who promised to introduce me to them didn’t. Eventually, some outlier in the middle of nowhere made a promise and delivered for once. It’s rare, but it does happen if you’re relentless.

3. Get focused.

What’s killing your success right now is the notification center on your phone. Every app you have wants to notify you of something so that they can get your attention and monetize. Your focus is now these software companies currency. Throw the phone on your bed, shut the door and get the hell away from it. There are some long hours required to achieve your dream. You’ll need to do some deep thinking. You’ll need to become a strategist like the general of an army about to go to war. Your dream is war.

Almost everything you do from when you make the decision to pursue your dream is about being focused on one thing. Everything else on your list needs to go in the bin. The smallest change in language that you use to describe your dream could make all the difference.

4. Throw out all the waste in your life.

There is wasted space in your closet. There is wasted space on your phone's contact list. There are people right now thinking about contacting you so they can waste your time. Dreams are achieved when a minimalist approach is taken.The only way I got even close to my dream was by reducing all the wastage. By wastage, I mean the people who made me feel sad… the possessions that took my time and money… the money I thought I had to make to be successful that I didn’t need.

5. Get excited about something.

Attracting all the right things to your dream comes through excitement. When you show you are bloody happy about your dream and let your passion shine through, people and things flood in like a disaster recovery effort after a hurricane. My pitch to the man in Silicon Valley had nothing to do with the idea. In fact, if you email me, I’ll give it all to you for free. Ideas are worthless. What got him excited was the enthusiasm I had for what I was doing which for some reason makes people write big checks. When you break it down, he just wanted to bag some of that excitement for himself. Why wouldn’t he, I mean it feels so damn good. You need to get to a place with your dream where you can give out some of those bags of excitement for yourself. That’s how your dream will come true.

6. Do something seriously whacko.

I’ve found that when you do something seriously whacko you force yourself out of your comfort zone. Your comfort zone is what’s sabotaging your success. What did I do? I signed up for kite surfing lessons. Why? I have no freaking idea whatsoever.

I don’t even know if I’ll like it. The offer was made to me and instead of thinking it over like I normally do, I just said yes. The reason was that it felt right. It felt like a new opportunity. It was breaking the pattern and that’s how you get closer to achieving your dream.

7. Don’t try and have all the answers.

Humans are obsessed with knowing everything in advance. I’m the worst offender of this myth. I always want to know the answer to everything in advance. It’s a kind of OCD if you can call it that (I’m no psychologist). There are plenty of unrelated experiences that will happen in your life and you’ll have no idea why. All I can say is that these experiences will somehow link to your dream at some point and you will realize they were required. Take my music examples listed above as a good demonstration.

Lose the obsession to plan every aspect of your dream and focus on taking action and trying new things. The answers will become available at the right time as long as you commit to taking the action.It’s been a long time between drinks for me, but success is coming. I hope the same can happen for you too.