Dream Like Everything Is Possible

The Guide to Extraordinary Living - Part 2

Mr. Dream, a 235 lb. boxer, lost his only fight to Little Mac, 98 lbs.

Remember the first lesson, that everything is about others? Life is not about you. If you don't remember that, go back and read Part 1. Actually, find someone else who would benefit from reading Part 1 and have them read it, then you can read it for yourself.

I can hear you now: “It's cool. Life is not about trying to make myself happy. Check. Got it. Alright, I understand already. So, what should I do that's not designed to make me personally happy? Hmm..go buy a happy meal? Oh, wait, no, that's about me. Watch a movie? Oh, that's about me again. Make a sandwich? Hmm..this all seems to be about me. What should I do?”

Well, let me tell you. Start Dreaming. Go ahead – try it right now. Start dreaming about what you want your life to look like.




Okay, okay, stop. We're running into two problems. First of all, you're not sticking to the first principle, which is that things are not about yourself. These ideas are supposed to build on each other - like the beautiful and long lasting pyramids, not be stand-alone concepts – like the ugly and target-worthy Sphinx. Secondly, you're not dreaming big enough. You're dreaming like everything in your life just happened to go well, like you had the best day of your life or something. I don't want you to dream about winning the lottery, or scoring the perfect job, or marrying the perfect person. I don't even want you to dream about making the neighborhood you live in a nicer place (though that's a good start). I want you to dream WAY bigger than that. Dream like everything is possible.

What do I mean by that? Let me explain it this way: Suppose Bill Gates and Scrooge McDuck dropped by your house. They offered to fully fund whatever your dream was, for however long it took to accomplish it, and then said that if you somehow failed or came up short, they would supply the manpower that it would take to make sure it happened (or they would consult the Junior Woodchuck Guidebook, which might have just the solution you need).

What would you dare to dream if you were guaranteed to be successful?

Now we can really start the dreaming. Poverty? Gone. Preventable diseases? Prevented. Human Trafficking? Eliminated. Corruption? Confronted.

See, right about now I'm losing some of you. You're totally checking out. You've heard this before, you think. I can imagine that voice in the back of your head, the one that keeps whispering “How? How would you get there? It just isn't practical.” I can imagine that voice quite well, since it's in the back of my head, too.

No matter what you dream, that voice will be there. Many times, it will actually come out of other people's mouths – the very people who are supposed to love and support you. It will constantly be telling you that it's ridiculous to dream like that, that one person can't make a difference, that it's a waste of time to give yourself to a cause that's doomed to fail from the beginning. But let's remember something: Without a dream, life is already a failure. Dull, lifeless – remember?

So, what do we do with the doubts and fears that have stopped many people ahead of us? How do we handle the voice that will confront us every step of the way, even in the very beginning of our dreaming stages?

It's easy. We act. We take a step. We start making the dream a reality. The voice hates that.

That's also the next part in the series...

Accept That Everything You Think You Know is Wrong

The Guide to Extraordinary Living Part 1

Everything you know is wrong. Yep. I’m sorry to be the one to have to break this to you, but you’re wrong. Totally.

I don’t just mean the kinds of things you think I mean. I don’t mean the correct spelling of pseudonym or how many miles it is to the sun (even though, if we were being honest, you probably are wrong about those things, too)*. I mean the important things, such as the basic assumptions you have about what is real that direct the decisions you make, and ultimately how you live your life.

Huh?

Let’s take the classic example. Take the entirely fictional case of Timmy. Timmy is in his senior year of high school, and he sure is excited. He has big choices to make. Which college to go to, what major to choose, who to take to prom. Good thing for Timmy, he’s a child genius, the star Quarterback and a 100 mph left-handed pitcher. So he has his pick of colleges and prom dates.

He’s managed to narrow it down to two. Colleges, that is. On one hand, there’s Yale. On the other hand, Lone Pine Community College. He sits on his bed with the acceptance letters to both laying on the covers in front of him. His eyes dart back and forth. Finally, they settle on one. His hand reaches for the letter. Which one does he choose?

The wrong one.

No, not the community college.

They’re both wrong.

How can they both be wrong? Because they’re both based on the assumption that if he goes to a good school, he’ll get a good education. And if he gets a good education, then he’ll be able to get a good job or maybe even start his own company. And if he gets a good job he’ll make a lot of money and then he’ll be able to provide a safe, comfortable life for himself and his future family. And then he’ll be happy.

There’s the problem. He assumes that a safe, comfortable life will make him happy. But it won’t. It will make him dull. Lifeless. He may have a semblance of a happy life, but that won’t be the extraordinary life that he is longing for in his heart. Safe and Comfortable are what the padded cubicle walls are built out of. Instead of being set free by riches, he is made a prisoner by them.

You see, we've all bought into this idea that we are to be successful, or pursue what is in our hearts, or be rich or famous. That, whether we are teachers or shoe salesman or Fortune 500 CEO's, we should be happy doing what we want and that we should achieve some measure of comfort and stability. It's a subtle way of turning everything that happens into something about you. It's totally inward focused. The key to success supposedly lies somewhere inside of you, where if you can just create the right environment, you'll trigger this thing called happiness and then: you will have arrived.

Which brings us back to the dullness of life. We can't always do things only for ourselves – sometimes we are forced to go to a job, or live somewhere we don't like, or be in close quarters with someone we don't enjoy. We make up for this by going on self-indulging binges whenever we have the chance. Movies, food, sports, sex, video games, hobbies, TV, even religion. We pour so much energy into making ourselves happy despite the fact that we're obviously not happy that we miss the most central truth to all reality: life is not about us.

Life is not about you.

Real life, I mean. Extraordinary life. Think about it for a minute. Think what would happen if you stopped doing all the things you did every day that were designed to make you happy. If you seriously consider it, you might start to realize that everything you ever do is done in an effort to satisfy this insane hunger to become happy.

I would humbly suggest that the path to extraordinary living lies in exactly the opposite direction. Instead of the world flowing inward to me, to satisfy my needs and desires, it should flow outwards. I should focus my attentions and energies on other people, and pour myself out to help meet their needs and desires.

A few steps down this path, and you start to realize how amazingly refreshing it is. Don't get me wrong – it's not all clouds and roses. In fact, it feels a lot like I imagine a heroin addict would feel during detox – crazy, unstable, and intensely hungry. When you're not gorging yourself on entertainment, your eyes begin to see things clearly for the first time, and that can really hurt.

When it happened to me, I realized several things. That I essentially suck at relationships. That I don't make any sort of impact with people. That I am weak and fearful and hardly ever do anything daring or bold. But I also realized how free I was – how much more strength and potential flowed through every second of my day. Since nothing was about me anymore, I had way more space to move about. I was no longer a slave to my comfort.

So, that's the first step to extraordinary living: Accept that everything you know is wrong. That life is not about you, it's about what you can do for other people. If you can grasp that, you begin to sense the limitless potential and dream of much bigger things than a nice house or big screen TV.

But that's the next step...

*The sun is approximately 93 million miles away from earth. See, I told you that you were wrong.

Luke's Guide to Extraordinary Living

Let’s face it, life is drab. Real life, that is. Sure, there’s lots of excitement, humor, and drama on TV, but it can only come portioned in 30-minute or one-hour chunks. Real life is almost depressingly boring.

What do I mean? Boring is getting up, showering, going to a job, coming home, eating, sleeping, doing it again. Boring is looking back over the last three weeks and realizing that you don’t have one distinct memory out of the entire block of time. Boring is listening to radio, or reading the news, or watching TV, just looking for something to get worked up about.

Like I said, drab. Plain. Muted.

In fact, in most work places I’ve been at they actually encourage drabness. There was one office I worked at that literally had a policy that you couldn’t hang things on the cubicle walls because it ruined the “sound absorption qualities” of the cubicles.

I know most of us have come to accept that there is a certain amount of routine required for living, that in order to survive you have to have a paycheck, and in order to get a paycheck you’re going to have to get a job. The dullness just goes with the territory. You can have your fun on the weekends and holidays. I know most of us have come to accept that, but I believe it’s a very reluctant acceptance.

I think really we long to be free. We long to do something with our lives that makes us excited. We want to feel passionate about what we are doing. We know there has to be some way life can be more vivid, more inspired. We ache for the rewards of a life that has meaning to it, that can take our breath away with beauty and pierce our hearts with tragedy. We are tired of being numb.

But, we quickly let the sound absorption qualities of our cubicles stifle those thoughts, because immediately following them is a fear. A very subtle fear invades us when we start thinking about freedom and purpose. It’s not the kind of fear you would expect, not the “How would I pay the bills?” or “I have responsibilities, I can’t just let everyone down” type of fears. Those are simply the clothes we dress the fear up in. Those are the sensible words we use to cover up the fear that really eats at our souls. The real fear, the one we hardly ever truly address, is this: that there is nothing greater - that this dull reality is all there is, and that if we were to go crazy and risk everything for our dream of extraordinary living, we would find that it was all just a pipe dream and that extraordinary life doesn’t exist.

You see, as long as we don’t put extraordinary living to the test, we can at least hope that it’s out there somewhere. The hope - that maybe one day we will stumble into it, that the perfect job will come along, or we’ll marry the right person, or win the lottery, or invent something that will make us millionaires overnight - that hope keeps us alive and gives us the motivation to push through the dullness day after day after day. Without that hope, we have to face the awful truth that we are half-dead already.

So, is it out there? Can you truly live an extraordinary life?

Yes.

How? I aim to show you. In the next series of entries I will reveal a simple - yet difficult - guide to extraordinary living. It’s more possible than you ever imagined.

Stay tuned…

Okay, okay, I know

Yes, I know it's been forever since I've updated.

I'm sorry.

Busy, new child, etc. etc.

Hopefully, more consistent updates from here on out.

Here's one now!