A Prescription for Ailing Dreams

by Ken Robert on June 23, 2010

If you were sick, would you do what you must to get well?

Would you take your medicine? Would you elect to have the surgery?

Would you work to learn more about your illness, its causes, and its treatment? Armed with such information, would you follow a good doctor’s orders?

Would you get the support you need?

I hope you said yes. I hope you think you’re worth such efforts, because you are.

But what about your dream? Do you think it’s worth it too?

If you find your dream is ailing, will you do what you must to nurse it back to health?

Will you take your time? Time is like medicine for dreams. You have to take as much as you need in the proper doses and according to a proper schedule. Those who want you to rush might be errantly persuading you to do something equivalent to taking your pills all at once or not at all.

Will you work to learn more about your dream, its requirements, and its methods? Information empowers you. Just as it can help you find the best way to treat an illness, it can also help you choose the best approach to making your dream a reality. You don’t want to get bogged down in endless research, but you’ll do yourself a favor if you learn something about what you’re facing.

Armed with such information, will you seek and follow good advice? Are you willing to be humble and admit you don’t know everything there is to know and allow those who’ve done what you hope to do to teach you a thing or two? Doctors study for many years for a reason: to prepare themselves to give you the best care they can. Those who have pursued and achieved dreams similar to yours, have achieved them for a reason. You don’t have to follow their every move, but you should at least be willing to hear what they have to say.

Will you get the support you need? Will you ask for help? Will you talk to people, share your hopes and fears, and allow them to spur you on? Facing an illness on your own can be lonely, depressing, and debilitating. Pursuing a dream on your own can be the exact same thing.

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Thirteen Versions of One Thing

by Ken Robert on June 21, 2010

A few years back there was a movie called Thirteen Conversations about One Thing. I never saw it, but the title has always stuck in my head for reasons I don’t understand.

But recently, it came to mind again when I found myself writing the same post more than once. I realized that sometimes you have to create thirteen versions of one thing before you can decide which one to roll with.

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Problems

by Ken Robert on June 21, 2010

If your life is free of problems, you might want to check your pulse. I’m afraid you may be dead.
Life, should you choose to live it, will always present you with a steady stream of problems.  There’s simply no escaping them.  If you don’t believe me, just give it a try.  I think you’ll find yourself with a very big problem on your hands.
Now, some folks would tell you to see your problems as opportunities.  I think that’s sweet, but I prefer to call them problems, because the only opportunity they present is the opportunity to solve them, so, at the end of the day, they’re still problems.
But problem doesn’t have to be a dirty word.  After all, if I handed you a large stack of cash, I’d also be handing you a stack of problems.
Where will you keep it?  How will you invest it?  How much will you save?  How much will you spend?  So forth and so on it goes, but I suspect you wouldn’t mind these problems at all.  Most of us would agree they’re good problems to have.

If your life is free of problems, you might want to check your pulse. I’m afraid you may be dead.
Life, should you choose to live it, will always present you with a steady stream of problems.  There’s simply no escaping them.  If you don’t believe me, just give it a try.  I think you’ll find yourself with a very big problem on your hands.
Now, some folks would tell you to see your problems as opportunities.  I think that’s sweet, but I prefer to call them problems, because the only opportunity they present is the opportunity to solve them, so, at the end of the day, they’re still problems.
But problem doesn’t have to be a dirty word.  After all, if I handed you a large stack of cash, I’d also be handing you a stack of problems.
Where will you keep it?  How will you invest it?  How much will you save?  How much will you spend?  So forth and so on it goes, but I suspect you wouldn’t mind these problems at all.  Most of us would agree they’re good problems to have.
If your life is free of problems, you might want to check your pulse. I think you may be dead.

Life, should you choose to live it, will always present you with a steady flow of problems to wrestle with. Each day, the lights go up, the alarm clock sounds, and, as soon as you open your eyes, your next match begins.

You could hit the snooze button, pull the covers over your eyes, and go back to sleep, but do this repeatedly and you’ll just find yourself with a different set of problems to wrestle with (unpaid bills, hungry children, weakening muscles, disappointed friends and family members).

There’s just no getting around it. You and I were born to be wrestlers. It comes with the privilege of breathing.

The trick, I believe, involves three things: learning to love wrestling, learning some good moves, and choosing a worthy opponent.

As crazy as it may sound, part of being happy involves learning to love wrestling with problems. You know you’re going to have them, so wishing it were otherwise will only disappoint you. It’s better, I think, to acquire a taste for taking them on.

At one point in my life, I had to wrestle with vegetables. As kid, I wasn’t very fond of them, but as I grew up I knew I needed to include more of them in my diet. To do so, I had to acquire a taste for them, which is what I did. One by one, I learned to not only eat new vegetables, but to enjoy them as well.

It can work the same way for wrestling with problems. You just have to look at them and perhaps yourself a little differently.

You can train yourself to see problems as opportunities, because each one that comes your way asking you to take it on, to get a hold of it, and pin it to the mat. If you can see the opportunity to do so as a means to better your or someone else’s life, develop your skills, and increase your confidence, then the problem doesn’t look so bad.

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Plant Seeds, Pull Weeds, Make Rain

by Ken Robert on June 20, 2010

Plant Seeds.  Pull Weeds.  Make Rain.

It’s helpful, I think, to understand what you’re doing when you’re doing it.  I keep thinking about this idea of gardening.  You plant seeds.  You pull weeds.  You make rain.

But is that all you do?  If writing things like this is an act of planting seeds, what are you doing when you’re actually writing something with an end in mind?  What are you doing when you’re “working” on something as opposed to just playing around with an idea.

Is there a garden analogy for that, too?  Are you tilling?  Are you fertilizing?  Are you planning a landscape?  Organizing?

Doesn’t quite apply.  You’re watering the plants, I suppose.  Maybe reading is fertilizing.

Oh, metaphors, how you baffle me.

Tagged as: process

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Something to Make a Case Out Of

by Ken Robert on June 20, 2010

When you show up every day, you’re building a case. Lawyers build cases. Scientists build cases. They do so with facts, with details, with observations, with tests. There’s no one single detail that makes the case. It’s the cumulative impact of all the details that builds the case and sways the jury, persuades the dissenters, and eventually changes the way we see things.

When you show up every day, you’re building a case. You’re accumulating experiences, producing results, and thus eventually persuading yourself that your dreams are worth your efforts.

I want to make a case for this. I want to explain how showing up everyday helps you build a case for taking your dreams seriously.

Tagged as: Something Daily

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