That is the equivalent of 834 regular years. Radio is that tough, that cut throat, and that difficult.

Suffice it to say, 20 years is an incredible accomplishment.

During a Q&A session, someone asked Dave a question. They said, “What was the moment you realized that you had arrived?”

Dave’s answer surprised everyone in the crowd.

Without missing a beat, he said, “We haven’t arrived yet. There’s still so much we need to do. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.”

I love that answer.

Want to stay humble?

Want to stay diligent to working on a dream for 20 years?

Keep working. Keep doing what you need to do. And above all, don’t arrive.

What’s that?

It’s exactly what it sounds like, things you’re going to do later. Know what is at the top of mine? “Do a ton of public speaking events.” Know when I’m going to do that? In 12 years, when both my kids are in college.

When I’m 48, my daughter McRae will be in college. It will just be Jenny and I holding down the fort. And hopefully, if things have gone well, I will be able to travel a whole lot to speaking events with my wife. Being home all the time won’t be the same priority because I’ll have my home, Jenny, with me.

So right now, I have to say no to some things. I have to compromise. I want to be an awesome dad. I want to not miss my kids’ childhoods. Of the two things, speaking a ton and my kids’ childhoods, I am crystal clear on which one I can replicate. I can always find new places to speak. I can never recreate my kids’ childhoods. I get one go-round at those. So I compromise. And what I get in return is far greater than anything I ever lose.

When I was in the 11th grade, a family in our town started to fall apart. The marriage was crumbling. They hated their jobs. Their house had radon. (That was the mold of my generation. Radon owned the 90s like MC Hammer owned baggy pants.)

One night my mom and I were talking about the spiraling hurt of this family in question. Turns out they were thinking about moving to Hawaii. They thought that maybe escaping Massachusetts would help. They thought that getting out of the bitter Northeast and moving to a tropical paradise would fix their problems.

As we discussed this possibility, and I tried not to think about Tom Selleck’s mustache, my mom said something I’ve never been able to forget. “They might move to Hawaii, but wherever you go, there you are.”

That statement was incredibly depressing to me.

“Wherever you go, there you are.”

It felt like an anchor on me, a prophetic word that guaranteed that I could never escape my problems. And though I didn’t like hearing those words, they are true.

If you have marriage problems in Massachusetts, you are going to have marriage problems in Hawaii. If you’ve got deep wounds in Boston, you will have deep wounds in Honolulu. If you’re running from something on the Atlantic Coast, that something will catch up with you in the Pacific Ocean.

Whaaa – waaaa. (I think that’s how you spell that sad trumpet sound, though there is some debate online.)

How melancholy is that idea? I better make a casually witty off-hand comment about Z-Cavaricci’s to let some of the tension out. So many belt loops! But if you think about “wherever you go, there you are” through the lens of Awesome, it’s actually an incredibly encouraging statement.

Because maybe your dream is to be a musician. You want to sell out Madison Square Garden but first you have to sell out Pineapple, AL. The bar there seats 50 people and 3 show up for your show. That hurts a little. But ultimately, it can still be awesome. How? Because wherever you go, there you are.

The location isn’t your definition of awesome. Playing music is. Geography is just a place. Whether you are in a small bar or a huge arena has little consequence on how awesome you are being. Your awesome is intact regardless of longitude and latitude.

You could go anywhere in the world with your definition of awesome, and wherever you go, there you are.

Awesome in hand.

You want to change the world? Get a buddy pass for awesome on all your trips. Before you even land in your new destination, you’ll know how it’s going to be. Awesome.

That’s not an invitation to be fake or pretend that the sunsets won’t be more amazing in Hawaii than they are in Connecticut. Not at all. I hope you’ll enjoy the uniqueness of everywhere you go. Just don’t ask a spot on the map to determine if you’re awesome. Don’t ask geography to determine whether you get to be awesome on any given day.

End that debate right now without geography’s input. Your mailing address doesn’t deserve a vote in the “Will I be awesome today?” discussion. That debate is over.

Just be more awesome, more often, wherever you are and wherever you go.

That is OK because you are not everyone. You are you. And if your dream made 100% sense to someone else, it wouldn’t be your dream–it would be theirs.

But instead, it’s a little weird, it’s a lot personal, and it’s yours.

Don’t round off the corners because someone who doesn’t have the same fire inside is confused. Don’t shape your square peg into a round peg because someone criticizes it. We’ve got enough of those dreams. We don’t need anymore. We need yours.

That’s the one that’s missing.

Yours.

How do I know? Because I’ve personally tried it, and I’ve seen hundreds of other people try it too.

Since the third grade, I knew I wanted to be an author. A teacher named Mrs. Harris laminated a book of my poetry, and I felt published. In that moment, I knew I wanted to publish a real book someday.

I started to fantasize about that moment the closer I got to turning it into a reality. I got a book deal based on my blog and started to march toward actually publishing a book. In my head, I began to believe that when the book was really published, that when I saw it sitting on a shelf in a bookstore, my whole life would change. On the day it released, the crust of the earth would shake with the momentum of the moment and thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people’s lives would be radically changed instanteously.

Do you know what happened on the day the book released?

Not much.

On the morning of the release, I woke up and was the same exact person as I was the day before. I wasn’t taller or smarter. I had the same fears and worries, hopes and dreams.

I went to work at my day job in an IT department. I sat in traffic on the drive home. I ate dinner. I went to bed.

And I felt pretty empty about that. I had focused on the wrong thing. In my head, I thought the execution, the publication of the book, was what mattered most. I made that day, that moment, that action, that event, my true north. I thought that was what would change me. I thought the book being published was my Awesome. And then I got there and realized it wasn’t.

It was like seeing behind the curtain and realizing the great Oz was just an old man pulling some levels. And the greatest sadness is that when you do that, you miss the real joy, the joy of living out your Awesome.

If you’re going to spend 12 months writing a book, you can’t be miserable for 12 months with the hope that you’ll find your joy on the day the book releases. If you’re going to spend 5 years building a business, you can’t be miserable for 5 years with the thought that you’ll find joy on the day you sell the business.

One day of temporary happiness is not worth months, or even years, of misery. You’ve got to love the act of what you’re doing. And if you do, if you find a way to be Awesome, everything else becomes scenery.

We join a new gym.

We try a new diet.

We read a new book.

We add and add and add and then eventually wonder why our world feels fast and thin and out of time.

What if instead, you decided to delete something? What if you created a “to-don’t list,” something that lots of authors recommended? What if you macheted your calendar until only the most important things remained?

It’s possible. And more than that, it’s powerful.

And you just might be surprised at what you can see when you delete some of the clutter, because sometimes what remains is hidden unless we start deleting.

Like this sidewalk. Look what removing some dirt and grime revealed.

Let me go ahead and deflate this concern. You’re going to fail.

You and I are going to fail at a lot of things. We’re going to be horrible! Especially at things we’ve never done before. But here’s what we’re going to do. Here’s what will save us – we’re going to fail at things that matter.

My thought is that if you’re going to risk, and maybe even fail, fail at something that matters, so that even in failure, lives are changed. That’s what I thought when we decided to raise an additional $30,000 and build a second kindergarten in Vietnam a few years ago on my blog. We already had our home run moment. We had our newspaper headline, “Blogger raises $30,000 in 18 hours.” We had succeeded! We could have put a period on the end of that sentence and moved on.

But it turns out that exclamation marks are a lot more fun. They’re harder to get, certainly, but they are way more awesome. So we decided to do it again–the day after we had finished the first campaign. I knew that if we failed and only raised $10,000, that money would still help kids in Vietnam. We would have failed, but the results would still be glorious. So my motto became “Fail Gloriously!”

The only real type of failure is when you succeed at something that doesn’t matter. That’s the kind of failure you should avoid at all possible costs.

Think about it. If you succeed at something that doesn’t matter, who cares? It doesn’t matter. If you fail at something that doesn’t matter, that’s twice as bad. You failed and the thing you gave your life to didn’t matter in the first place.

So do things that matter. And when fear tells you that you might fail, say “I know, but it will be glorious.”

It looks like this monkey.

Focus on whatever you are working on with as much focus as this cowboy monkey.

And don’t ask questions about why he is so focused. Trying to unravel the absurdity of this photo will blow your mind.

Changing an industry is a big dream. It’s the type of dream that ends conversations because people don’t know what to say next. It seems  impossible.

And the truth is that the world has plenty of dreamers. It’s the doers that we need more of. The doers get stuff done.

Instead of staying a dreamer, Rebecca became a doer. She talked to my friends at Proof about how their Launch package could help her turn her dream into a brand and take it online where it can reach even more people.

Because a dream will stay a dream unless you decide to do something about it.

A few weeks ago (after several months of hard work), Rebecca – with the help of Proof – officially launched CatalystVETS. Proof hooked her up with a logo, website, business cards, a tool to build her email list, and – most importantly – a much clearer understanding of how she can tackle the issues facing her industry on a national scale.

The other thing Rebecca knows is that having a good brand doesn’t start or stop with design. It takes hustle to make it happen. And she’s not done hustling. By 2017, Rebecca wants CatalystVETS to have 100 partner animal hospitals and be the #1 blog in the veterinary industry.

By 2022, she wants CatalystVETS to be the premier veterinary leadership group in the United States and the national authority on how to  successfully envision, create, and sustain your unique animal hospital.

It might happen slowly, but eventually the best dreams stop being dreams and start being something more real. And lot of times, it takes a  good team to help you take that step.

As a special offer to the Quitter Community, Proof is offering a $500 discount on their LAUNCH package with the promo code “dreambig.”

We see the book they finished.

We see the business they successfully opened.

We see the Wright Brothers and their plane.

And, in that moment, we lose sight of the millions of small things they did along the way and feel discouraged by the small things in our own path.

We don’t see the hard work or the failures or the struggling. We only judge the victories.

But, at a museum recently, it struck me that the Wright Brothers started with a kite. A simple kite and a breezy day. It was not grandiose. It was not the kind of action that would get you immortalized on a coin someday. It was a kite.

Today, as you continue to work on the small decisions in the midst of your big dream, remember it’s OK to start with a kite.

More than OK, it’s the best way to one day soar amidst the clouds.

Question:
If a “kite” represents a small decision or action, what’s one kite you could start with today?

When I attended the Quitter Conference in September, I didn’t expect to hear that I should learn how to be awesome where I currently am. I thought I would learn that I should be really awesome only when I work on my dream. I don’t know how I thought I was supposed to be the rest of the time, but it didn’t matter. All I cared about was being awesome at my dream, which for me is writing.

I wanted to hear that just getting through the day would be good enough. You could slap the “well done” sticker on my back as I walked through the doors on the way to my car. At this point, I would start being awesome. Even as I write that, it sounds ridiculous. However, I did in fact think that way.

It’s impossible to separate the way you are at work with the way you are out of work. I know we like to tell ourselves that we’re not the “same” person at work. The truth is, though, we are still our “self.” We learn to be and act and feel the same way at home as we act at work. If we’re a Debbie Downer (or a Jesus Juker) at work, we learn to become that way at home. If we’re a positive, upbeat person at work, then we learn to be that way at home.

Jon helped me see that I need to be hustling at work, too. It’s crazy to think there is some magic switch you flip whenever you walk out of your day job, like the passion switch automatically turns on. If we start being awesome at work, then maybe some of that awesome will spill over into our dream job.

Turning your dream into a reality never happens overnight. Here at Proof, we work with entrepreneurs who have been hustling on an idea for months—and sometimes even years.

When it’s time to take that idea from a dream to something more, that process takes time too. It takes time for you to share your vision with us. It takes time for us to design a logo that embodies the spirit, goals and personality of what you want to create. And it takes time to translate that logo into a strong, cohesive website that tells your story well from the very beginning.

Our friend and client Nancy Brook is in the middle of this process. She signed on for our LAUNCH package after we met her at the Quitter Conference last fall, and we’re blown away with her mission. Nancy is a national speaker and teacher, a former Disney cast member (Minnie Mouse, to be exact) and a Martha Beck-trained life coach. She’s also spent more than 20 years as a nurse practitioner with a focus in oncology.

That’s a pretty diverse résumé. But Nancy saw a way to tie it all together with her company, Glass Slipper Consulting. Through Glass Slipper Consulting, Nancy provides advocacy and navigation for patients facing a cancer diagnosis as well as cancer training and mentoring for nurses, healthcare professionals and coaches.

We can’t wait to launch Nancy’s website and introduce her to the world at the end of February, but since we just finished Nancy’s logo, we wanted to give you a teaser of what’s to come.

When it comes to branding, your logo is hugely important. It’s one of the first conversations you have with a potential customer or client, which means that whatever it says had better be good.

After a two-day workshop with Nancy to help her (and us) better understand her brand, we presented her with seven logo options based on
our discussion. After a few conversations and a bit of revision, we’re happy to introduce the new official logo for Glass Slipper Consulting!

Now the only question is, what can we help you launch? As a special offer to the Quitter community, we’re offering a $500 discount on our LAUNCH package with the promo code dreambig. Don’t let fear tell you no.

It’s simple, and this image–that someone made for me–explains it.

I’ve had a dream for years, but I allowed busyness, fear and other excuses to get in my way. Then I stumbled across Jon Acuff’s blog, and I read about Finish Years and Quitters. I was intrigued, so I kept reading the blog, then I bought Jon’s book. A Quitter and a Finisher at the same time?  Impossible, right? But being a Quitter isn’t just about quitting a job. According to Jon, being a Quitter is about being “someone who quits average. People who refuse to accept common and instead dare to live out the talents and gifts they’ve been given.”

It was scary but I did it. Thanks in part to the motivation I received from Jon’s posts and from reading Quitter, I decided to quit normal and finish a dream. I also learned a few things in the process:

1. I must make time for my dream. My kids are going to get sick, my husband will sometimes work late, the phone will ring and I still need to find time to make dinner and do laundry. It’s easy to stay busy, but nobody is going to make the time for my dream except me. This may mean leaving laundry unfolded (which I usually do anyways), staying up 30 minutes late, or getting out of bed 40 minutes early.

2. I’m not entitled to dream time. While it’s important to make time to dream, it’s just as important to remember that working on a dream is a privilege, not a right. It is not okay to grow impatient with other people when they “interrupt” dream time or to leave basic needs unmet because of pursuing a dream.

3. I need to work on my dream when it’s easy and when it’s hard. Working on my dream at Starbucks for an evening while my husband watches our kids is easy. Opening my laptop and getting to work after a long day is tough, but I will never finish a dream if I don’t work on it during difficult times. No dream worth fulfilling will always be easy.

4. I can’t let fear paralyze me. If I stopped working on my dream every time I felt fearful, I would never have met my goal. I learned that I have to push through the fear of failure, rejection, and ridicule if I’m going to see my dream come to fruition.

5. Support and accountability are immensely helpful. I told a few trusted people about my dream. The encouragement I received, and the natural accountability that occurred when people asked how things were progressing with my dream, helped me to push through the difficult times and keep on working. When in-person encouragement isn’t  available, online support can also help tremendously.

6. Any progress is still progress, no matter how little.  If I had ten minutes to work on my dream, that’s ten minutes better than nothing. Instead of berating myself over not making more progress, or getting off track of my goals and then trying to catch up, I just picked up where I’d left off as soon as I could and went from there. Giving myself the freedom to make slow progress helped me to keep going, even when I couldn’t contribute much time to my dream.

Jon wrote a great article about how to build a finish list. The work isn’t always easy, but the payoff is immeasurable. What will you do to become a Finishing Quitter this year?

It wants you to wake up in the morning and say, “Do I feel like writing my book today? Do I feel like staying up late and working on my business plan? Do I feel like being more awesome?”

And guess what your feelings are going to tell you?

No.

Feelings are fun and important, but they turn into drunk little jerks when you ask them to run your life.

Awesome is a choice, like loving your spouse or going to work. I don’t wake up each morning and ask myself, “Do I feel like loving Jenny today?” Because guess what, some days the answer is no. My feelings are hungover from some argument or some petty insecurity that’s kicking around my heart. I don’t feel like starting the morning with a ride on a double bike, followed up by a picnic with my wife.

I chose to love my wife. I made a commitment. I honor it with my decisions.

You don’t feel like going to work every day. You don’t call a meeting with your feelings before you leave the house and say, “Hey guys, how we feeling about work today? You feel like the beach instead? OK, that makes three weeks in a row, but what am I going to do. You’re in charge!”

Nope, you go to work. On the mornings you bound out of bed and the mornings you have to drag yourself into that cubicle like it’s a prison.

Don’t let feelings make your choices. Some days, you won’t feel like being awesome. People always seem surprised by that. They ask me if I ever don’t feel like writing. They ask do I ever feel like quitting, or does it ever feel difficult? The answer is yes. On at least 90% of the days, those are the first feelings I have before I sit down with a blank piece of paper.

I might feel great once I get into the middle of the page, but when it’s blank and staring at me with those haughty eyes of sheer nothingness, I feel like quitting before I even write a single word.

But feelings don’t get to make my decisions.

And they shouldn’t make your decisions either.

That’s what my friend Thad always says when he sees musicians pretend they don’t care on stage.

You’ve seen the type. They stand up there with a guitar and a face that says, “I don’t even care if you like this song. Whatever. This is stupid. I’ll play it. Whatever.”

And they act like they don’t know how they got there. As if perhaps they were just walking down the street, saw an open stage with a guitar, and picked it up. It doesn’t matter to them. Whatever.

Thad doesn’t buy it. He knows how much they care about that moment. They worked hard to get booked at that venue. They practiced long hours in their bedroom, dreaming up songs and notes. They built elaborate sets in their mind, and shot the movie version of that moment a thousand times.

But fear tells you, if you care too much, you’ll get hurt.

The path to dreaming is littered with apathy shields. Fear will constantly try to hand you one. “Here, this will keep you safe. This will prevent you from being hurt.”

What fear doesn’t tell you is that apathy does form a wall between you and hurt, but that same wall blocks you from joy too. It cuts you off from awesomeness and happiness and the thrill of seeing a tiny piece of your dream come true.

Don’t listen to fear. Apathy is a foe, not a friend, a numbing agent that does not distinguish between joy and pain. Beware the temptation to use it as a shield. It will block you from hope too, not just hurt.

Be excited on stage. Jump on stage. Have fun on stage. That’s Awesome.

Like any loving, self-respecting father, my dad had his fair share of cheesy sayings and inspirational quotes he liked to throw out whenever he felt a situation merited one. His “thrill of the ride” mantra somehow trumped them all, and he managed to work it into nearly every situation of life: work, dating, college football. And he made sure to lay it on extra thick when I started dabbling in stunt work.

Allow me to regress. For a brief period of my life, I had the unique opportunity to travel as a member of an action sports stunt team (Think Evil Knievel wannabe). We performed in stadiums, at monster truck rallies, and at rodeos–mostly in the southeastern United States.

My journey down this rather obscure road began when I was very young and culminated when I quit my job working at a bank to move to Southern California so I could focus on my riding full time. It was a dream come true opportunity, but I learned very quickly that quitting was only half the battle.

As you can imagine, this profession is a rather bumpy road (literally), and my journey included more than one visit to the emergency room. With every get-off and subsequent injury, my father’s words echoed through my mind, “Is the thrill of the ride greater than the fear of the fall?”

For a Quitter, the answer is always yes. The thrill of making our dream a reality is always greater than the fear of the fall. Sometimes the fall hurts, and we’re all likely to fall a time or two along the way. You might bomb a presentation, or your manuscript might get rejected by a publisher …or seven.

But with each success, you get to taste the thrill. It’s so intoxicating you can hardly imagine the excitement of being able to do what you love every day of your life.

And that thrill trumps the fear of falling, so you press on.

The path of the Quitter is fraught with challenges, doubt and fear, and it doesn’t just vanish once you’ve achieved “Quitter” status. I believe anyone who has quit their job to pursue their dream will tell you that quitting was just the first step.

Life has a way of handing us circumstances that appear beyond our control, but it’s in those moments of doubt that we must remind ourselves of what attracted us to our dream in the first place. That thrill. That experience that opened our eyes to the realm of possibility where we discovered our calling.

(For more great writing from Seth, check out his blog!)

Whether from friends, family members or coworkers, it can feel challenging to get people on board for your particular mission.

But, fear not, I’ve learned something about support recently.

Here is the simple truth:

People help people who help people.

That’s it.

Want someone to help you with your dream?

Help someone else first.

Become a beacon of help first.

Raise your flag first.

Help is a boomerang. And if you’re not constantly throwing it out, it will never come back your way.

Very rarely will it ring your doorbell.

Or knock on your front door.

Or find you on your couch watching a reality show.

But it is not mysterious. In fact, long ago Picasso told us all where inspiration could be found. And I agree.

It is not the end…often, it is the point at which the story really gets good.

After all, cloudless skies make for boring sunsets.

Safe adventures make for boring stories.

Don’t believe me? Ask Dave.

Want to be the best in your field, your city, your planet?

Want to do something great?

Study greatness.

Like Hunter S. Thompson typing out The Great Gatsby, so he knew what great writing “felt like,” find some heroes and do what they do.

Paint someone else’s painting.

Be an apprentice.

Buck the trend of entitlement and be led.

Be mentored.

Be taught.

Set up an easel, like these people did in a museum I visited, and learn how to paint someone else’s masterpiece before you paint your own.

There is no guarantee you will finish your dream project this year.

There is no guarantee the business deal you’re working on will work out.

Or that guy will finally call you.

Or a million other things that maybe you’ve been waiting for.

But there is always possibility.

And this year, that is enough to keep going.

My Quitter story actually begins five years ago when my wife and I moved back to Nashville after many years of living in New Mexico and Wisconsin. We arrived with loads of debt, two small children, and a big loss on the sale of our house in Milwaukee that we had only bought 18 months prior to moving. We spent our first nine months in Nashville living with my father, stepmother and three half-sisters. Yes, nine of us in a 2,500 square foot house with my wife working full time, our two sons in daycare, and me without a job.

I am a carpenter by trade but had gone to school to become an acupuncturist, which is my passion. There weren’t and still aren’t a lot of jobs or career opportunities for acupuncturists, so I called a long-time family friend who is a contractor and strapped on my tool belt one more time. Doing something was WAY better than doing nothing. While working in home remodeling, I was going through the process to get my Tennessee state license to practice acupuncture. Once that was completed, I went to my mentor in acupuncture, who has an office here, and rented space from her one day a week.

I worked construction full time as I started to build a practice. It didn’t go well. I did this for a year-and-a-half with poor results. We were no longer living in my father’s house (thankfully), and I was still looking for a full-time job in acupuncture. I finally found one, applied for it, and got the job. It started out well for the first six–maybe nine–months.  Then it slowly went downhill. I realized I was working in an office with very high turnover, lots of gossip and rumors, and a complete lack of leadership from an owner who hated his employees. My wife and I were (and still are) on the Total Money Makeover, so I felt that, since the money I was making there was decent, I needed to stay until we were debt free. So I sucked it up for three-and-a-half years.

But something amazing happened the last six months I worked there. My wife came home after listening to Dave Ramsey on the radio and told me about this book he was talking about called Quitter. I ordered it that day and read it twice in a week. Then my wife and I sat down and came up with a Quitter Plan. It took many hours and a lot of yellow legal pad paper. We came up with a twelve-month plan. In that time, we would be down to just owing on our house, and we would have $10,000 in the bank. Then, I could move into my dream job.

I was still working full time as an acupuncturist at the awful company one day a week as a massage therapist. Plus, I was spending one day a week at my “dream job,” which was at a clinic that practiced acupuncture the way I had always known it could be done. I was working 50 to 70 hours a week.  Three months into my family’s Quitter Plan, I was let go from my full time job without any warning.

I freaked out–but just for a short time. I called my wife as I was leaving to tell her what happened, and she was so calm. She told me we would be okay. I knew that my other part-time job didn’t have any full-time openings. Our Quitter plan didn’t have me starting there until they had a full-time spot open, but I left a voice mail for them as soon as I hung up from talking with my wife.  The owner called me back thirty minutes later and said that they could take me full time starting on Monday! Their acupuncturist had given notice that morning, so they were about to be short-handed at a very busy practice! I have now been employed there full time for over six months. The clinic has almost doubled in size, and we are planning to open a second location next year.

I give a tremendous amount of credit to reading Quitter. It really spurred me to have a plan, and do it the right way, so I wouldn’t put my family in a financial mess and my passion on the back burner again.

In the three years leading up to this change, my wife and I paid off $60,000 in debt and had our third child. It can be done and Jon’s book showed us the way.

Thank you, Jon.