A good friend at my recent book signing looked down at the five books I had on display at the signing table and asked, “How the hell do you find time to do this on top of working full-time and everything else you have going on?”
I really hadn’t thought about it like this and the easiest thing I could think to say to Chris was, “When you love something, you always find time for it.”
And that is absolutely true for me. There are things that I know I have to do, like pay bills and eat, so I accomplish those things by working at CMU 40 hours a week. But there is a whole bunch of time around that that I can be working on the thing that I want to ultimately replace that 40-hour a week income with–which is writing.
For me this means being up by 5am and at a cafe writing for a couple hours before I go to an office and tell engineering students how to live their lives.
All of us find time to do the things we care about even if we say we haven’t got extra time. We do, it’s just that we spend it on different things. I stopped going out to bars and drinking when I was 22. I realized I had a goal that was bigger and more important than getting trashed with my friends on the weekend. Instead of drinking and partying, I was studying Biology. After five years, I got a bachelor’s degree in Biology. And that degree has opened a ridiculous amount of doors for me to do things that I never thought I’d be doing.
I will keep writing and I will replace my income with it. I have no doubt that this goal is coming to pass. I believe it and I work for it the same way I believed and worked for the Biology degree. There is no difference here. Hard work, determined will, belief, and advanced thankfulness that I’ve already achieved my goal are all that I need to get me there.
Sometimes people look at their big goals and dreams as unachievable. They’re nice to look at, but not something you could ever actually get to. This is something that I’ve never believed. I’ve always known, somehow, deep within myself that anything can be achieved and attained, especially when that thing is so damn important. And maybe there’s something there. Maybe it’s that people’s dreams aren’t as important to them as maintaining mediocrity to maintain their bills.
Go bankrupt. Go broke. Go after your dream. It’s damn important.
Get my new book here: Blog Book vol.2: The Demons We Meet
Comments