Should you be getting up early?

Should you be staying up late?

Should you be hustling and working and grinding?

Should  you be practicing right now?

This chart was designed for musicians, but I think it works for any dream you’re chasing.

So I’ll let it answer the question: Should you be practicing right now?

Gaze long enough into the future and it’s easy to become obsessed with it. Which is a shame, because chasing your dream is all about “the now.”

That probably makes you think of yoga. That’s what I assume anyway. When someone tells me I need to “live in the now” or “be present,” I think “There’s going to be some chanting involved with that, right? Candles? I bet there are candles. Something in a nice sandalwood.”

I’m not against dreaming about the future, not at all. If you told me, “Let’s go to a water park next weekend,” I wouldn’t respond, “No thanks, I live in the now. Let’s just organically see if that happens next week.” If anything, I’d probably ask you how long the lazy river was.

Being awesome is all about the future, but it’s not a huge fan of “next.” Neither is my wife. On Saturday mornings, sometimes I will wake up like a Golden Doodle, a scientific creation every bit as strange to me as the Liger. I’ll bound out of bed and ask my wife, “What are we doing today? What’s next? What’s next?”

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One night, I flew out to San Diego to see a friend of mine. We were both speaking at a conference in LA on Wednesday and decided to hang out the night before.

I was nervous and distracted at dinner because my mind was fixated on the speech I was going to give. It was my first time on the main stage of this particular conference. They had given me a five-minute window to speak in which I had to be funny, insightful, interesting, and also introduce the next speaker – Dave Ramsey. 5,000 people, lights, cameras, introducing the owner of the company I worked for, no problem.

As I discussed the event with my friend, he held up his hand and stopped me short. He said, “What if we tried something? Let’s deconstruct our lives. Let’s each say something we’d miss if we lost it and why we’d be sad. I’ll go first.”

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I love when creative folks visually interpret ideas I’ve shared.

This one is about who we need you to be. And like most things I write, it’s simple. But I dare you to actually do it.

I hate my teeth.

In addition to root canals, cavities and other general mouth maladies, they are trying their best to go crooked.

Despite having braces three times, twice as a kid and once as an adult, they are refusing to stay in place. There is one tooth in particular that is trying to make a beeline to the back of my mouth.

I blame myself for this. I didn’t take care of my teeth as a kid. I didn’t brush well or rinse with Listerine or ever floss. I didn’t wear my head gear faithfully and lost my retainer. Other than deliberately chewing rocks, I’m not sure I could have been a bigger jerk to my teeth.

And now that I’m an adult, I’m trying to fix that, and it’s proving to be a bit of a challenge. I sat with a dentist in Atlanta who had assessed my mouth via molds and 3D x-rays. He had a plan drawn up for me.

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I have a love/hate relationship with the show International House Hunters. I love the houses. I hate the people who are looking at them.

Maybe hate is too strong of a word, but I’m a little jealous of the people who are looking at them. The show is pretty simple: a real estate agent shows three houses to a couple to look at in some exotic market. Then, at the end, they buy one of them. And each episode is the same, with the buyers saying this:

“Well, we need a third house, and we’ve already got one in Turks and Caicos, so we thought we’d try Florence, Italy. My job allows me to travel internationally and do my work from coffee shops on cobble streets. We’ve got a budget of 4 million dollars and would like to be able to see the Duomo from our rooftop deck.”

And then they look at three houses and inevitably pick the most expensive one that was way outside of their budget. Once you’ve watched the International version, it’s impossible to be interested in the domestic version of the show. Once you’ve seen a couple scour the streets of Prague for an apartment that looks like a castle, it’s impossible to watch a couple look for a 2 bedroom fixer upper in Akron, Ohio.

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Most of us think we need to know the finish line before we cross the starting line. We want life planned out, the risks removed, safety guaranteed.

But in this short video, I share the truth about finish lines and starting lines. (If you want to come to this event, there are still a handful of tickets available for Start Night Austin. Sign up today!)

When we start something new, we come up with goals. We want to make a certain amount of money or grow a business or get a book published. But one day, my friend Bob challenged my understanding of goals.

Bob started an airline. He told me that story at dinner, like that was a normal thing people just do. He said that he’s a lawyer, so he’s used to filling out paperwork and that’s all it takes to start an airline.

So he filled out all the forms in Canada, and then they reminded him that he needed a plane.

“Oh, that’s right!” He said, “So we got a plane put together. It was a beaver, one of those planes that can land on water. We painted it Krispy Kreme colors because we figured they knew what they were doing. We hired a pilot and made him wear an official uniform with a thin black tie, shoulder straps, black hat. The whole works. We had one ticket counter girl and we started making flights up and down the inlets of British Columbia.”

Apparently, starting an airline is one thing, growing it is a completely different thing, but Bob had a plan.

“We decided that our mission was going to be bringing free fresh fruit and free newspapers every morning to every hunting lodge and logging cabin in the area. That was it. Two years later, we had ten planes and ten pilots. We broke even. It didn’t make any money, but the goal wasn’t to make money. The goal was to be awesome. And it was!”

The goal was to be awesome.

What if that was enough in life? What if you didn’t have to have it all figured out? What if you didn’t have to know exactly what your dream was and how to achieve it? What if you didn’t have to be the perfect student, perfect boss, perfect parent or perfect anything?

What if your goal was to be awesome and that was enough?

How awesome would that be?

Excited about your dream?

You better be, because the rest of the world is going to take cues from you.

You want us on board? You want support and help and cheers from the sidelines?

Be enthusiastic about your dream. You’ll be the first one, but you won’t be the last.