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.

I thought Aqualung was dead.

That sounds like the opening line to a comic book, but it’s not.

Aqualung is the name Matt Hales used when he started his musical career. But I thought he was dead, or had failed as a musician, because I hadn’t heard from him in a while.

His debut album in 2005 was fantastic and included the song “Brighter than Sunshine.” But for the last seven years, I didn’t hear anything about him and assumed his career had fallen apart. I was wrong and had forgotten one of the principles of awesome:

Awesome builds its own planet.

I was reminded of that when I read an article updating the life of Matt Hales:

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