“Youth is wasted on the young.”
– George Bernard Shaw
The older I get, the more I notice changing seasons. When we’re young we truly take for granted that our lifespan will continue on forever. There will always be tomorrow to finish what we left undone today. There will always be next season to make some more snow castles.
As we get a tiny bit older, we carry that procrastination with us; we imagine ourselves someday writing that novel we have buried in our souls and not yet on paper. We believe that after the kids grow up or once things calm down at work we’ll get back into shape.
Why do we lie to ourselves?
Why do we get comfortable pushing things off until conditions are perfect when we know deep down that life isn’t perfect and the only genuinely faultless moment that can exist is the one we’re in? The moment we are living right now is the only one we know for sure we’re ever going to have.
Table of Contents
Your Dream
There’s no promise of tomorrow and yesterday is so far buried in history that we can’t hope to retrieve it. When will you start holding yourself accountable for your dream?
Your dream has no advocate for it apart from you. Without you, your dream will never come to fruition.
I’ll be frank; your purpose in life is not to clock in and clock out a day job. Unless you would do your job for free, you’re not doing what you were put on this planet to do. Most people aren’t.
Why do we allow ourselves to settle for anything less than the life we actually want?
We Are Our Habits
When you boil life down to its essence, the reality is that we are absolutely the culmination of the things we do most often. If we indulge in alcohol excessively, we are most likely to live slovenly existences. If we exercise routinely, we are likely to become physically and mentally sharp.
The more I read what others have written, the deeper my mind is able to travel into my own thoughts and work out problems I was having difficulty with. The more I look, the more I eventually see.
Our brains are a muscle to be worked, and so is life. The more you push for in life, the more you become accustomed to receive.
Our dreams are no exception.
If your dream is to write a novel, then it really becomes as simple as writing regularly. Setting out to accomplish 300 words per day is far more manageable than 40,000 words all at once. Hell, if you actually wrote 300 words daily, you’d have that 40k masterpiece in just over four months. If you kept it up, you could write three full scale novels in a year. Yet we build such an accomplishment up as though it takes a lifetime. A lifetime of hoping takes us nowhere and leaves a lot of pages left blank.
It has often been said that the key to achieving a dream is to figure out what the cost is and then determine if the price is worth paying. If it is, then you pay it.
A Life Worth Living
Why is this important? Why do dreams matter?
I have come to understand that life has meaning only insofar as we have dreams to work toward. Each of us define the value in life for ourselves. There is no ultimate meaning that will appeal to every person. We are all different.
On this site we spend the vast majority of time discussing personal finance. We talk about how to make money, which investments make sense, and the best methods to achieve financial freedom.
What the hell is the point, though? Surely the point of getting rich isn’t simply to be rich, right?
In the first page of The Myth of Sisyphus, late French philosopher Albert Camus cut to the chase:
Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
Of course, there is a lot that goes into such a determination of whether life is worth it or not. Namely, what are the pieces of life that give it flavour?
Again, it comes down to having something to aim for. The most fascinating people are those with a vision for the future they feel empowered to create.
The Question
The heart of the matter comes down to a simple question. Most pose the question, “What would you do if you had all the money in the world?”
I prefer to ask, “How would you choose to live your life if money was no object?”
The former lends itself to things such as playing tennis or upgrading one’s car. The latter digs deeper and asks about lifestyle choices such as spending more time with family or devoting greater time and energy to learning an instrument; the stuff that matter.
The irony of this is that the ability to work on our dreams, to live the life we choose, to be with the people we care about, the seed of this exists in every waking moment.
The secret to a Rich life is to understand what you would do if wealth and possessions didn’t matter and then to begin, uncompromisingly, to pursue that life.
Thank you for reading.
– Ryan
What dream are you pursuing?
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