What gets you up in the morning? What drives you? Everyone likes to bandy about fancy words and quotes from the latest motivational books.  How often do you hear thing like: “Ahhh bru, you must follow your passion.” “A life not lived is a life wasted.” “Dream big and live the life of your dreams.”  “Stay positive man.” I can hear myself saying these things.

Yes these are all good and well and make you feel pumped up whilst you reading them, or listening to the speaker. The problem strikes when you have to wake up on the next Monday and go back to your normal job and deal with the normal people who don’t like Mondays and are already making plans for the next weekend.  Don’t get me wrong, we have a library full of motivational and self-help type books. I do find great value in many of them and still to this day read them, but over the past 20 odd years of reading these types of books, attending seminars and watching videos, I have come to realize that they all have a common thread. They all say much of the same things and encourage you to have a dream, set an action plan and go get it.

The beauty of all these methods is the starting point, have a DREAM. I love getting caught up in the dream part. I love to dream about sailing to tropical beaches, traveling the world, diving, never having to worry about money or bills. Not having to go to work on days I don’t feel like it. In fact my dreams are endless and infinite. Dreaming is the easy part. Believe me I can dream BIG. Like bigger than Branson big. I get this part of the program and I am extremely good at it.

The second part is having a plan or a so called map. This is a little more difficult, but planning is generally fun, you do it in some quiet place set all the good intentions and you set out writing down numbers or processes that you pull out the air and commit it to paper because, this is the process to make our big dreams come true. This is Step 2 of our action plan to living the most amazing life that we see on reality TV or the nice glossy magazines. This is part of the magic formula to success. Some people will go so far as to make focus boards or vision boards, to help them keep their eye on the goal. Here too I must put up my hand, and admit that I have bought into the hype. I have journals of great schemes that I was going to undertake or have already undertaken. Network Marketing Business (that was going to have me retired within 3 years); Trucking Business (The numbers looks great on our plan); a therapy business (This was my ticket out of a 8 – 5 job, the plan was brilliant) and if I dig out the journal I could fill pages with other wonderful grand schemes that would have me on the beach within a few short years.

I have been working for 15 years now in the insurance industry. This has been my anchor and my platform to try out other plans. It is not an easy career, but after having built up a client base and some systems, I have created a place where my time is relatively flexible. At the rate I am going I reckon that island holiday is roughly only about 25 – 30 years away. That would put me at a relatively young 62 years old. I would probably have to come back from the island and work for another 3 years and hopefully the markets have been good to me and my retirement funds can provide for me until the day I leave this world. I am a third of the way through my working career, and it seems as if time has sped past. Another 25 – 30 years will go by in the blink of an eye and that island holiday awaits.

To date none of my well-constructed plans have come through for me. In fact all of them have ended up costing me more money than I made. Not a single one has shown a positive return. Not one. The only steady income stream is my monthly salary from my insurance work.  So the most logical thing to do is see the pattern, stop with these grand schemes and focus on building the insurance business and work hard for the next half of my life and then hope I will be ok.

The only thing is; I am a dreamer. So I will not settle for a holiday in 25 years’ time. I have already started working on the next plan to get to these dreams that I have. This time the plan is way different, I have no seed capital, no idea how to monetize the system, no way of guessing if I will even see any return, and yet I sit on Sundays and Monday evenings and work on my plan. The progress is painfully slow, it is outside my comfort zone. I have had to do things and say things that I would normally bury deep inside me and never let anyone even be aware these thoughts resided within me. I believe in my dream, it may never come to fruition, I may never even come close, but just the fact that I have a dream keeps me going. It gets me up early in the morning, it motivates me to write down my thoughts and feelings, it makes me feel like I have opportunities, and by having opportunities I have choice, and having a choice means I am free.

I am free. Go on say it aloud, I dare you. In fact shout it out your window right now and see how you feel. If you just shouted out aloud I bet you felt a little silly and embarrassed, but think about how you are feeling, I bet part of you really believes you are free, and that is a wonderful feeling. I know I am free, free to try and make a difference to the life that seems laid out in front of me. I see it as a challenge to dream ridiculously big and then set out to try achieve it. I have failed numerous times, yet I keep getting up. Do I honestly believe that I will one day manifest my dream? The answer should be quite obvious to you by now. Of course I do, otherwise why would I keep dreaming, planning and trying?

One day I will look back on my life and see all the attempts I made to live out my dreams. If by some chance I am sitting on a yacht in the tropics I will know I have arrived and reached those great big dreams. If I am sitting at my desk behind my computer shutting it down for the last time before I retire I will smile at myself and have fond memories of all the adventure and plans I tried and know that my destiny was predefined and try as I might I could not change it. Either way, one thing is for certain, I will not be bemoaning my fate because I have always been completely free.