Failure: In Three Steps

I spend a lot of time wondering what separates the people who achieve their dreams from the masses and masses of us who do not.  Yes, there are some people who have the leg up in one form or the other. They may have more money, more time, more support or more connections. Yet, I believe that although there is no one recipe for success, there is a recipe for failure. I’ve spent a lot of time over the past couple weeks coming to terms with why I am not further along with my writing. I am not talking about achieving best-seller status a la the likes of E.L James, JK Rowling or Amanda Hocking. I am referring solely to output. My catalogue should be vastly larger by this point and my blog’s last post should not have been in January of 2017. Yet, here we are. I have the potential but I seem streamlined for failure. Habits are strong, powerful things and I will get into bad habits in another post. I have, however, isolated the three things that keep me in this perpetual place of non-achievement.

Photo Credit: Sira Ananmong per www.freedigitalphotos.net

This has the potential to be a very long post so I will divide these steps into individual posts. Here are my top three steps to failure.

Step One: Dreaming

Photo Credit: www.freedigitalphotos.net per Stuart Miles

Yes, I said it. Quit dreaming. Stop it. Leave it at the door. Turn your back on it. It probably seems preposterous to say that in order to achieve your dreams you must stop dreaming. That is the literal opposite of chasing your dreams. However, it is essential. Anyone who wants to achieve anything in life needs to get behind the concept. I am not saying dreaming is a bad thing. Quite the opposite. In the years since I’ve decided my end goal in life is to be a full time writer I have done a lot of dreaming. I have plotted what my writing schedule was going to look like, where I would work – what I wanted to be able to pay myself, how I would organize it around school runs for my yet-to-be-contemplated but often dreamed of children. Yet, despite all of the dreaming, I am barely any closer to making this a reality than I was before.

Why? Because I wasn’t doing. I wasn’t being consistent, goal-oriented and persistent. Although the initial dream and desire got me started, the dreaming was wasting my time. It became an excellent procrastination device which prevented me from doing the very thing necessary to make the dream reality. How many of us are guilty of this? I have realized the only way to succeed is to give up the dreamer status (sorry, John Lennon) and do instead. Set a plan with rational, reasonable and reachable time frames. What have you wanted to achieve that you’ve spent more time dreaming about than working towards? What steps can you take to stop dreaming from ruining your dream?

Tschuss,

Rilzy