GMbooks Blog

Everyone, at some point in his or her life has dreamed of being somebody special, someone famous. Have you fantasized about being the one who hits the game winning home run? And how many times have we dreamed of being rich, successful, happy with our relationships or what would we do as the winner of the next $10 million lotto?

Often, we dream big dreams and have great aspirations. Unfortunately, our dreams remain just that, daydreams. And our aspirations easily collect dust in our mental attic.

This is a sad turn of events in our life. Instead of experiencing exciting adventures in self-actualization, we get caught up in the humdrum of living from day-to-day just barely existing. But life could be so much better, if only we learned to aim a little bit higher.

The most common problem to setting goals is the word impossible. Most people get hung up thinking I cannot do this. It is simply too hard. No one can do this.

However, if everyone thought that, there would be no inventions, no innovations, and no breakthroughs in human accomplishment. There are currently 75 million videos at this moment on YouTube, does that mean 74,999,000 are failures? The average person reads five blogs each day so it is obvious that they continue to search for answers. Impossible is only a word, therefore, learn to seek out more questions.

If you limit yourself with self-doubt, and self-limiting assumptions, you will never be able to get beyond what you consider impossible. If you reach too far into outer space without working towards your goal, you will find yourself clinging onto the impossible dream or getting crushed by the next celestial object headed in your direction.

Remember President Kennedy told us that we went to the moon, not because it was easy, but because it was hard. If you told someone 100 years ago that it was possible for man to walk on the moon, they would have locked you away. Thirty years ago if you told someone that you would send mail from here to the other side of the world in a few seconds, they would have said you were out of your mind. FedEx was Fred Smith’s Masters Degree thesis and his professor thought he was crazy. But, through sheer desire and perseverance, these impossible dreams are now realities.

That old saying, “If at first you do not succeed, try, try, again,” was planted in my head at an early age. Do not know why, maybe as a son of a West Virginia coal miner I realized early in life that I was living in a hopeless employment environment with little to no opportunity for a future, other than digging coal. At the age of 15 my father took me down into the mine and I knew instantly that this is not for me and I fled the state a year after graduating from high school.

When I arrived in California I was faced with the opposite, an overwhelming choice of opportunity and I discovered that if I tried something that did not work I quickly found other options to accomplish the task.

Too many people will sit down at these computers and the minute they cannot get it to work or cannot find what they are looking for they give up in frustration, but Google has clearly shown us that we need to search other words, other avenues and maybe consider another direction. Part of the discovery is the adventure, so do not get caught up in a failure mindset. I have always maintained there are dozens of ways to do things, when something does not work, I make a mental note that this is one that does not work for me, and I move on to another option. It may take three or four or even more attempts, but what a wonderful and fulfilling experience it is when you hit upon the one that works.

A few decades ago I was hired as a commercial printing salesman in Los Angeles, the kind of career with lots of rejection. You need to be a bit thick skinned for such a career and get accustomed to people closing the door in your face. Most of the salesmen in the company had years of experience and therefore, they had all of the big companies buying commercial printing locked up, so my potential as the 15th salesperson was daunting. The man who hired me said he did not expect me to earn my monthly draw (an advance on future commissions) but he was willing to take the risk because he liked my attitude. I had just gotten married and really needed that job as well as any potential success. I remained in the company for 5 years and became one of their success stories. I won every sales contest—so they stopped having them.

What I discovered was that successful salespeople get lazy. Ten of those salesmen in the company had accounts billing $5 million in printing each year, and they were earning in excess of $150,000 per year in commissions, they were too busy running back and forth to service those clients that they rarely made cold calls to potential customers, or looked for new businesses. In my search for new business I discovered the county building permits department offered a wealth of information. This was in the 1960s and there were no computers so this was intensive, time consuming searches.  I knew that dozens of major companies were moving to California and also knew that these companies would have a need for printing.  I kept that secret for a number of years as my income topped some of those successful salespeople. Everyone, including my boss wondered where I was finding all of this new business. I tell you this story is to illustrate that there are opportunities all around us, do not seek out the biggest and most successful one; there is just too much competition. If you are only interested in the ripest apples on the tree you are walking away from a ton of applesauce.

On the other hand, some people suffer from totally outrageous dreams and not acting on any of them. The result? Broken dreams and shattered aspirations and a lifetime of pain, even self-loathing.

Try this exercise. Take a piece of paper and write down some goals in your life. Under one header, write down things you know you can do. Under another heading, write the things you might be able to do. Under one more heading, list the things that are impossible for you to do.

Looking at all the headers, strive every day to accomplish the goals that are under things you know you can do. Check mark them when you are able to accomplish them. As you slowly are able to check off all of your goals under that heading, try accomplishing the goals under the other header-the one that reads you might be able to do. As the items you wrote under things I could do are accomplished, you can move to the goals that are under things things you might be able to do. As you gravitate through this process, you will find out that the goals you thought were impossible become easier to accomplish. And the impossible begin to seem possible after all.

You see, the technique here is not to limit your imagination. It is to aim high, and start working towards that goal little by little. Remember the old question: “How to you eat an elephant?” The answer… one spoon at a time.  However, it is unwise to set a goal that is truly unrealistic.

Thomas Edison once said that “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” Nothing could be truer. For one to accomplish his or her dreams, there has to be hard work and discipline. But take note that that 1% has to be a think-big dream, and not some easily accomplished task. Ask any gym rat and he or she will tell you that there can be no gains unless you are put out of your comfort zone. Remember the saying, No pain, no gain? That is as true today as the day that remark was coined.