In which I attempt to encourage you to follow your dreams and try to tell you how.

Like most people these days, I spend time socializing on social media. In my case, it’s Mastodon, a system remarkably like Twitter in the early days, where you can post short “toots” with text, images, links, and/or polls and then discuss them with the other folks who have seen them. There are lots of differences between Mastodon and other social media, and because that’s not really what this post is about, I’ll skip a deeper discussion. Let’s just say that because there’s no algorithm determining what you see, you see all of the toots posted by all of the people you follow, as well as the conversations between the people you follow, even if you’re not involved in that conversation.

I use social media for the social aspect of it. I’m not trying to become an influencer or increase my follower count. Although I will occasionally post links to new jewelry items I made and put up for sale and I always link to new blog posts (which is done automatically), I mostly just share images, observations, thoughts, and short term plans with the folks who follow me. I’m pretty much looking to see the same thing from the people I follow. I don’t see many toots every day (considering the hundreds of people I follow) and that’s because I have filters set up to block out all the political crap going on in the world. I’m not sticking my head in the sand, but I’m also not stupid enough to get my news from social media. (If you’re getting your news and “facts” from social media, take a moment to think about why and whether it’s really a good idea. No need to tell us your conclusions here, though.)

One of the things that makes me inordinately sad these days is the number of posts by people I like who mention something they want to do but can’t. Sometimes they explain why they can’t, otherwise, they just leave the reasons unspoken. Maybe the thing they want to do is so outrageous (at least in their minds) that they feel that don’t need to explain why.

Either way, I’m left to wonder how much they really want to do this thing that they “can’t” do.

Making Excuses

Eight and a half years ago, in July 2016, I wrote a blog post titled “Making It Happen.” In that post, I focused on my personal achievements as they related to my ownership of a helicopter and the building of a successful career as a pilot — when I was in my 40s. I talked about how I was able to achieve a goal that most people — including me at one time — think is out of reach.

In that blog post, I relate a short anecdote about an airline pilot friend questioning why I was bothering to learn how to fly helicopters when I’d never make any money doing it. He was basically saying I was wasting my time. I went on to write:

But think about how easy it would have been to accept his “expert opinion” and not try to move forward with any kind of career as a pilot. It was a built-in excuse for failure. Why try if this guy who knows the industry better than me says it’s impossible?

How many people do that? How many people simply don’t try because they think the odds are stacked up too high against them?

I wish I had a dollar for every person, man or woman, who told me that they “always wanted to learn to fly.” My question to them is this: what’s stopping you? (I sure hope it isn’t an asshole like my former airline pilot friend.)

I don’t want to re-write that post here — you can go read it for yourself if you want a more specific example from my life of what I’m trying to communicate here. But I do want to share one more paragraph:

Everyone dreams of doing or learning something special that’s important to them, but how many people do it? Some try but fail because they don’t realize from the get-go that achieving a difficult goal is a lot of hard work with very long hours and no guarantee of success. It takes planning, it takes funding, it takes the ability to work smart and have Plan B (or C or D) ready when things don’t work out as you expected. It’s easier to not try and to simply keep dreaming.

How Important Is It?

And that brings me back to my social media friends and their toots about dreams they “can’t” fulfill.

The other day, in a conversation about the most recent stock market downturn (which looks pretty bad this time), I tooted:

It always comes back, but now that I’m tapping into it to buy silly things like food and the occasional computer monitor, I’m just hoping that if we do have another long-term dip, I’m still alive when it comes back.

I tried retirement and it doesn’t suit me. Gotta keep busy. The trick is getting someone to pay me for that busy time.

The person I was conversing with replied:

Not to minimize what you’re saying, which is certainly legitimate. But I would love to trade having a 9-to-5 for trying to convince people to pay me.

With the way things have been going lately, let me know if you need a deckhand. I can tie a few knots reasonably well, I can read a chart, and I can reliably put in to a dock under sail power. I know that last one isn’t relevant, but I still am amazed I can do it and i think its okay to brag every once in a while.

Okay, so in one toot he confessed two wishes for changing his life:

• going freelance
• working on a sailboat

He didn’t mention how much he really wanted to do either of these things, but he was clearly thinking about them. Are they important goals? Something he’d really like to achieve? Or was he just being conversational?

(Also, I bet he ties knots better than I do.)

But the one that really broke my heart this week was this one, tagged #3GoodThings:

– You can’t go, but you can dream about going, and that’s something.

– You can’t do, but you can dream about doing, and that’s something.

– Fancy coffee.

My questions to this person — which I did not ask — are:

• Why can’t you go? How much do you want to go?
• Why can’t you do? How much do you want to do it?
• Why are you apparently satisfied with dreaming about going or doing?

It takes a great deal of self-control to not draw people who post things like this into conversations. But that’s what this blog is for. I can address these things for a bigger audience while leaving the people who got me thinking about it anonymous.

If You Really Want It, Do Something about It!

Let’s do a little exercise together, shall we?

1. What do you want to do?

Think about something you’d like to do. Something you’d really like to do.

Learn to speak another language? Play the piano? Visit Notre Dame? See the Pyramids? Go sailing? Learn to fly? Juggle? Watch a Navajo weaver make a rug? Visit 100 countries before you’re 50? (or 60 or 70?) Run a marathon? Be an artist?

I could go on and on with all kinds of suggestions, but these are just seeds to get you started. I’m sure you have at least five things you can come up with that you’d like to do.

Note that I said do and not buy or own or have. We’re not talking about material things here. We’re talking about doing things.

Brainstorm until you’ve got a few. If you need to, set a 5- or 10-minute timer to think only about these things. Don’t get distracted! Write them down.

2. How much do you want to do them?

Now think about how much you want to do these things. How important are they to you? How they might change your life to make it better. Make some notes.

Do not think about why you can’t do them. Not yet.

If you have more than one — and you really should — rank them in order of importance. Which one is most important to you? Which one do you want to do most?

3. What are your excuses?

Let’s focus on that number one item. Ask yourself why you aren’t doing that thing. What are your excuses?

Excuses are what’s holding you back. Some of them are good, valid excuses. Some of them are just plain dumb. Let’s look at an example.

Suppose you want to learn to fly like so many passengers in my helicopter have told me they wanted to do. Here are some possible excuses — the ones I’ve actually heard:

1. I’m afraid of heights.
2. I’m worried about crashing.
3. It’s expensive.
4. I worry about something happening to me and my wife/kid/etc being left alone.
5. A friend said I could never make money doing it so I’d be wasting my time and money.
6. The weather sucks where I live.
7. I don’t have an airplane so when would I get to fly?

4. Which excuse(s) are valid?

Now look at all those excuses objectively and cross out the ones that are bullshit. If #1 and #2 are true, you really don’t want to learn how to fly. #5 is bogus; who cares what your friend told you? #6 is also bogus; weather changes and do you think you’ll live in the same place your whole life? #4 is problematic in that it assumes the worst — and indicates a very pessimistic view of your abilities. (Also, you’ve heard of life insurance, haven’t you?) #7 can be overcome with airplane rentals. Your flight school will rent an airplane to you. That ties in a bit with #4, which is probably a pretty valid concern, especially if you decide you want to fly helicopters.

Take the remaining list of excuses after you’ve crossed off the bogus ones and look at them one by one. It’s time to work around the excuses.

Coming Up with a Plan

Are you still with me in this exercise? I hope so.

At this point, you should have a very important personal goal written down in front of you. Beneath it are a list of excuses and you’ve crossed out the ones that are bogus. You’re left with one or more excuses — which we’ll now call hurdles — that are stopping you from moving forward with your goal.

Hurdles can be jumped. Or knocked over if you’re not much of a jumper.

Say the hurdle is money — which it so often is. It’s time to do some research. What is achieving this goal going to cost? In your actual currency of choice?

Make some notes about what it’ll cost to get started. You’ll need to actually do some real research on this. Don’t guess. Work the web. Make some calls. Get some real data. Write it down.

So many things have costs up front and along the way. Let’s take the learn to fly example. Here are some of the steps along the way:

1. Take a demo flight. Do this first to make sure you like it.
2. Sign up for classes. (I highly recommend that you do not pay for all training up front, regardless of any discounts they might offer. I could write a whole blog post about that, but not today.)
3. Obtain equipment you need: headset, chart, ground school training materials, etc. Keep in mind that you may be able to borrow some of this stuff or buy it second hand. That’ll save money.
4. Take classes. There are different prices per hour for dual flight time and ground school time.
5. Take tests. You need to pass a ground school test and there are test fees.
6. Take more classes.
7. Solo and get your solo flight time in.
8. Take your flight test.

Did I forget anything? Probably. You will, too. But be as thorough as you can.

By the time you’re done and have added it all up, you might be freaking out. Don’t. Money is just a hurdle. And in most cases, you won’t need all of the money to achieve your goal up front. You can often pay as you go.

Now it’s time to start brainstorming about ways to jump (or knock over) this hurdle. Look at your monthly spending. Where can you cut back? Can you reliably save $X per week or payday or month to cover the cost of this goal? I know folks don’t like it when people suggest cutting their coffee routine, but look at it realistically: if that latte costs $8 per day with a tip and you’re having it five days a week, that’s $40 a week and $160 a month. It doesn’t seem like much, but it adds up. What else can you cut? Streaming services? Magazine or software subscriptions? Dinner out? Car washes? Mani/pedi? Dog grooming? Happy hour gatherings? Weekend getaways? Lawn service? How about selling some of the crap in your garage or basement that you don’t need? That old exercise bike or set of cross country skis? (Or snowshoes? What was I thinking?)

How important is this goal to you? What are you willing to sacrifice to succeed?

Because sacrifice is what it’s all about. If you already have excuses for why you can’t do something, something has to change to make those excuses go away. You might have to give up something you currently have or do to move forward on what you want do do.

This is one example of one of the most common excuses for why we don’t do most things we want to do: money. We can’t afford it. Or we claim we can’t. But if we look long and hard at our current situation and way of life, maybe we can afford it — if we give up other things that aren’t as important.

Look at your excuses. Think about how you can get around them.

Trust me: if you want to do something badly enough, you can find ways to get around the hurdles.

Don’t Sit On Your Ass

I have to bring up my wasband here because my observations of him are a great example to share. My friend Jim hates when I mention my wasband in blog posts, but I was with the idiot for 29 years and it’s hard to avoid mentioning someone I was with for nearly half my life. (Hey, Jim? If you’re still reading these, skip ahead to the next section heading.)

My wasband wasn’t a dumb guy. From the day I met him in 1983, he impressed me with his apparent drive to do things with his life. He told me he was an inventor and he showed me the fiber optics he was playing with at the time. This was long before fiber optics became an important part of communications and almost a household word.

I say “apparent” — did you catch that? — because although he seemed ambitious and interested in chasing down his own personal goals, he never did. He never did anything with his fiber optic cable ideas. He never did anything with his solar power ideas. He never invented anything. When challenged about this, he claimed that designing the big, custom HVAC systems he did in his job as a manufacturer’s rep was “inventing.” Whatever.

Later in life, as I started and continued my journey down various career paths, I also started chasing down my own life goals. Learning to ride a motorcycle. Horseback riding and owning horses. Racing around lakes on jet skis. Learning to fly. In each case, I took the steps necessary to achieve a goal — for example, buying a motorcycle and signing up for motorcycle training — and he just followed. My goals became his goals. That was fine; it meant that we could do things together. But he never chased down his own goals. He didn’t seem to have any. Well, yeah, he did learn to fly a plane and even became a partner owning one, but he rarely flew it anywhere.

He told me once that he wanted to be a flight instructor in retirement. Great goal! Make it happen! (Ironically, that’s the phrase he repeatedly told me when our relationship and I were still young.) Making it happen meant building a certain number of flight hours. That was easy, considering he owned a plane hangared three miles away our home and we lived in AZ with near perfect weather all the time. It meant going back to flight school to become a commercial pilot and then getting his flight instructor rating. There was a clear path he needed to follow. He had the time, he had the plane, he had the money. But he didn’t do it. To this day, I don’t know why. I have to think that it just wasn’t that important to him.

I seem to have a knack for cramming vehicles into large spaces. Here’s my Wickenburg hangar back in October 2011. You can see my helicopter, my fifth wheel (which I lived in every summer when I worked in Washington state), and my wasband’s plane along with the golf cart I used to pull the helicopter out. I purposely bought a trailer big enough for the two of us to do long-term travel in, but I don’t think he spent more than 20 nights in it.

He also told me that he wanted to open a bike shop. A place to sell and repair bicycles. This was later in our relationship, as we were getting older. My helicopter work was taking me to Washington state every summer, which was a great escape from Arizona’s heat. The area had an amazing 11-mile bike path along the river. I suggested building a mobile business based out of a trailer that could be brought up to a park near that bike path in the summer and brought back south in the winter. Yes, I was on call and needed to fly when it rained, but when it wasn’t raining, I could help him with rentals and other parts of the business. We could be together all year, even when I had to travel north to fly. In the winter, he could set up somewhere closer to home or just focus on sales and repairs. It seemed like a great plan, a way to help him achieve his goal. But did he do anything about it? No. Nothing. Nothing at all for any kind of bike shop business.

And I won’t even go into his failed attempt to start a solar power business. What a farce that was. It takes more than buying a two-line fax machine and sitting at a desk to get a business going.

So you might be wondering what he did instead of working on any of these goals. The answer is pretty simple. After work, he sat on his ass in front of the television, channel surfing. He claimed he needed to “unwind.” Either none of his goals were important enough for him to chase down or he simply wasn’t willing to make any sacrifices to achieve them.

When our relationship ended, he was bouncing from one 9-5 gig to another, rapidly aging his way out of the job market. I have no idea what he’s doing today, or if he’s even still alive.

Clearly, this was a man who wasn’t very serious about making anything happen.

Don’t Give Up without Trying

Why am I telling you about him? Because I don’t want you to be like him.

If you have a goal, whether it’s to develop a new skill, take a trip, change your career, or start a business, do something about it. Make it happen!

As I said in that post from 2016:

What I do want to touch on briefly here is the fact that just about all of us have it within our power to make things happen for ourselves.

…

But do you really want to wake up one day when you’re 56 years old and realize that your life is more than half over and you haven’t achieved what you wanted to? (I think that’s what happened to my wasband; it pretty much caused him to lose his mind in a midlife crisis that went horribly wrong.) We only have one life. Why would you let it go by without at least trying to achieve your dreams?

Please. Do this for yourself.