Ride the 2014 Horse to the Promised Land

Tags

2014, dream, New Year, Promised Land, Year of the Horse

I feel, more than ever, that this is the year. It’s time for all the building blocks to come together and create the master puzzle that are my dreams. When the necessary innings come to a close I will score a dream home run. The year of the horse is the year I plan on riding into the Promised Land. Where I spend every day doing what I love and make money from it. Not rich money but money enough to live on. Since I am busy doing rather than writing about doing, that’s all for now.

Smile Big and Dream Bigger!

Advertisement

Overqualified = They Don’t Want You

Tags

dream, fear, overqualified, rejection, skills

Have you ever been rejected and then been given that dreadful, doesn’t make a damn bit of difference, reasoning? Yes, I am talking about the term overqualified. Because it happens more often than it should, we really don’t understand how illogical the term “overqualified” means when it applies to a role you want to assume. The absurdity really begins to take shape when you think of it in the context of a football analogy. Can you imagine the San Francisco 49ers rejecting the renewal of Joe Montana’s contract with the reasoning being over-qualification? If they did so with this reasoning, the fan base would have revolted and the General Manager immediately let go. This doesn’t even take into account the reduction in Super Bowl Championships. That is the absurdity of rejecting due to over-qualification.

When you get right down to the bone of truth and you are judged by a decision maker as overqualified, it flat as a pancake means they do not want you. In these instances, there is usually some other reason cloaked by the term – Overqualified. Overqualified essentially means you ARE qualified but they don’t have any other politically correct reason to reject you.

So how does all this content pertain to pursuing your dreams? The “overqualified” rejection is the subtle nudge you need to tip toe towards the dark forest of fear. While the forest is scary, the dream oasis is waiting for you on the other side. Those skills that have caused the proverbial “they” to reject you are most often the skills that can lead you to the pinnacle of your promised land. Harness that rejection, use that over-qualification competence, and let it become the key that unlocks your dream vault.

Until you ultimately harness the energy of rejection, Smile Big and Dream Bigger!

Why My Friends are Tired of Hearing about My Dreams

Tags

achieve, bug everyone, dream, dreams, friends, hearing about dreams, keep telling, tell, tell your dreams

I think I know what my friends are thinking these days. “Would you please stop bugging me about your dreams and what you are going to do once you achieve them?” Then there are the new folks that are most likely fascinated to hear my dreams, but think… “Why are you telling me this?” It’s simple really! The more people you tell the more likely you are to achieve your dreams. This idea on the surface, I realize, seems absurd. But once you delve deeper it really is not. The more individuals you tell, the more committed you become to achieving your dreams. After all, you don’t want your friends and family to see you fail. It’s almost as if everyone you tell is holding you accountable to achieve your dreams. You literally become more attached to your dreams due to the public declaration of your plans. Your dreams become that homework assignment you cannot fail, if you hope to become successful in the classroom of life. So keep telling, keep bugging, and keep spreading your dream gospel; because this is the road that leads straight to your dream haven.

Smile Big and Dream Bigger (tell more people)

Watching Somebody Else Live My Dream

Tags

dream, las vegas, november 9, poker, world series of poker main event

Do you ever wonder what it may feel like to watch somebody else live your dream? For many, that may never happen. It’s mostly due to a lack of other people’s dreams being televised. From being a writer to making a million dollars to becoming a successful business man, many people have done it yet most of it will not be televised.

Starting tonight, I will be watching 9 and only 9 different people live my dream. To make it even more difficult, only 9 people once a year live my dream. That dream is to play in the World Series of Poker Main Event Final Table. Don’t feel bad for me though because some people’s dream is to win a Gold Medal in the Olympics which only happens once every four years. Or some people dream of becoming President of the United States which only happens once every four years. Only one sole person every four years will get to fulfill this dream.

So this evening and the evening after, my eyes will be super glued to the TV. Not only is the event televised live but there is a set point where they need to get to each evening. Tonight they need to whittle down the field from 9 players to 3 players. Tomorrow they need to reduce the field from 3 players to One Sole World Series of Poker champion. With caffeine in hand, I could be watching for a few hours each night or for the entire night until dawn. There is not a deadline but only a player count they need to get down to. The previous 7 days’ worth of coverage took place in July and only showed a select number of hands. In addition, each selected hand was shown much later than the hand actually occurred. The next two nights, however, they will show every hand when it actually happens. The only difference in live coverage of this versus the live coverage of a sporting event is a short 15 minute delay. The delay ensures that somebody watching can’t relay valuable hand information to somebody playing. This live format may seem like no big deal, but it is the only time on television that live poker is shown.

The next two evenings will be very exciting for me. It’s my mixed up version of a Professional Football hopeful watching the Super Bowl. It will help me visualize the experience in my head like a broken records’ version of a movie. And when it’s all said in done, I will feel the tactile hallucination of that heavy gold bracelet on MY wrist. I look forward to a future blog when I achieve it and can write about what it means to me.

Until that time, smile big and dream bigger.

What Happens When a 13 Year Old Girl Changes an Entire Community

Tags

Bat Mitzvah, dream, dreams, jewish woman, joy, rabbi, teacher, tears, torah

My daughter has always faced challenges in her life. From the day she was born she struggled with both physical and emotional challenges. As she grew older, some things we realized she would never do and others we were pretty sure she would achieve. When we started planning her Bat Mitzvah over a year ago we discussed with our Rabbi the minimum amount of prayers and work she would need to do in order to technically qualify. After much discussion, the Rabbi basically boiled the whole event down to two simple prayers – The prayer before and the prayer after the reading of the Torah. The Rabbi explained that if she could just do that, she would fulfill her duty to become a Bat Mitzvah according to Jewish Law.

After that initial discussion and understanding, we started to review all the prayers and rituals that most children accomplish when doing their Bat Mitzvah. We then proceeded to list them in order of importance. We set up a plan to have her learn each one and then move onto the next one. We did this with the assumption she would only move onto the next if she could successfully do the previous. For each prayer this meant countless repetitions of the same lines of Hebrew, using the appropriate tune. My daughter had to wind through a maze of ritualistic traditions.

As the year progressed, she kept getting farther and farther along down the list. First she learned and was able to recite the blessings before and after the torah reading. Next she learned the torah reading itself, and so on and so forth. The Rabbi kept assuring us that she would do great and it would be a glorious day. You would think as a parent of a special needs child, I would have agreed. But as the brutal honesty pains me today, I had my doubts. Either way, I knew it would ultimately happen and knew it would be emotional. I just didn’t know how much of it she would actually do.

It is very hard to put into words what happened that day. She was able to “Wow!” our Jewish community’s world. That day there were really only about 200 people there including friends, relatives, and the usual 100 or so congregants. She magically turned each one of their eyeballs into a flowing faucet. I have seen on many occasions a large group of people cry in sorrow or sadness, but I can truly say, on that day, that I have never seen so many people cry for joy.

That day, my daughter was more than a Bat Mitzvah (essentially a Jewish Woman), she was the wise teacher of all of us and we were her students. The rabbi always says a few words to the Bat Mitzvah after she has accomplished all her tasks but I wasn’t prepared for what he was about to say. Through his own tears he explained how she did things in her own way and how it was completely acceptable. He explained how the community has grown to love and embrace my daughter Sophia. And the grand finally was when he described her as HIS Teacher, HIS Rabbi. And that’s when I knew my daughter had changed an entire community.

As a parent you always think your child is special. And truth be told, every child is. But somehow, my daughter has had an impact on a community that in my wildest dreams I could have never imagined. I struggle to explain in this blog, the magnitude of this occasion. I just wish you could have been there so she could have changed you too.

Re-engineered Dreams

Tags

Acceptance, Bat Mitzvah, dream, dreams, Expectations, Grow, Learn, Wisdom

As I face my daughter’s Bat Mitzvah just a few short days away, I can’t help but reflect on the dreams I had for her while my wife was pregnant and just before she was born. Those dreams came to a screeching halt when the Neurologist told us, at just one month old, that my daughter was missing an important piece of her brain. Even our Doctor, at that point, didn’t know what her life could be like. The range of cases was too large to predict.

So here I write with a totally different set of dreams for my daughter. I dream that she will do great and won’t need much help on the bimah. I sit here dreaming that she will one day truly become the young woman that she will become in tradition this weekend. I dream that she will one day have a job and live on her own. I am searching for just a few gold flecks in a muddled pan of sand.

Basically, my dreams for her have been re-engineered by nature. Through that re-engineering I have accepted her limitations. Still, there is much to be thankful for and new dreams have been revealed through my experiences with my daughter. After getting her diagnosis, I had simple dreams for her including walking and talking. Simple for us but potentially difficult for her. She achieved these a few months later than most kids but she did achieve them. I dreamt that maybe, even one day, she would finish High School. While she is not there yet, she is a little less than a year away from becoming a freshman.

Outside of the dreams she has already achieved, the dreams she will most likely achieve, and the dreams that are just too much of a stretch to achieve, I have learned something about myself and my own dreams. They are fluid and can change on a dime. They are still important to have and important to shoot for. I can only rely on an old but trite saying to describe it… “Reach for the moon, because if you miss… you will land amongst the stars.” Or something like that.

But there is one, very important thing that happened to me during the last 13 years. And that is the embracing of differences and even different dreams. It is one thing to say it but another to be living it. Every once in a while life surprises us with a beautiful unexpected gift birthed from tragedy. That gift for me has been wisdom. It’s the kind of wisdom that most spend their entire life trying to grasp. And here I am, just under half way through my life, and I have arrived at a destination island that takes a strong sturdy boat to get to. My daughter has taught me more in 13 years of being her father than I have learned in 12 years of High School, 4 years of College, and almost 20 years in the working world combined. Re-engineered dreams are just a whiskey chaser to that beer of wisdom.

Smile Big and Dream Bigger

Failure the Litmus Test

Tags

Abraham Lincoln, attempt, Bill Gates, determined, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., dream, dream bigger, failure, litmus test, poker, smile big, success, The Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison

There’s an old saying that goes… “What would you attempt if you knew you would not fail?” Initially, I liked that saying until I really started thinking about it. You would attempt everything you wanted to achieve and more. You would be like Bill Gates in a dollar store trying to decide which items to buy. In fact you may even under value your achievements because they were so easy to accomplish. Okay, it’s just a saying and maybe I am over-thinking it.

But then I got to thinking even deeper. How would I rearrange this saying if it was mine? Well I would change it to the following:

“What would you attempt even if you knew you would fail?”

Your initial thought to this was probably like mine… “Why would I attempt something if I knew I would fail?” Because the things that you truly value the most, you would attempt even if you knew there was a large chance of failure. You would go to the ends of the earth to chase down what you truly dream of achieving. Some of the most successful people in our history attempted things that they knew they were likely to fail at. Examples include the Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison, Abraham Lincoln, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The most difficult and awe inspiring dreams wouldn’t be true dreams without a large barrier to success. That doesn’t mean, however, that you give up on them. You keep trying and trying until you ultimately succeed. Like a turtle trying to climb Mount Everest in a snowstorm. In fact, you can even use this re-arranged saying as a litmus test. Would you chase down your dream if you knew you would mostly likely fail, and would need to make a multitude of attempts, over multiple years?

Let me share with you a personal example. When I was younger, about eight if I remember correctly, my dad taught me how to play poker. At the time it was just a game I enjoyed that brought us to the table as a family to have fun and interact with one another. As I grew older throughout high school and college I would play regularly scheduled games with my friends. I remember one of my best friends and me coming home after a game. We would lay out all the coins on the floor with a few one and five dollar bills covering the coins like a warm blanket. We were amazed that we could amass, sometimes as much as $75 from just a few close friends of ours. I didn’t think anything of it at the time as it was just a game that allowed me to have fun with some friends and make a little cash as a consolation prize. I continued this endeavor into college with different friends. The games were tougher, the money was larger, but it was still enjoyable and I still managed to regularly make money.

After college, I pretty much forgot about poker. Sure I knew how to play it and even played it well from a home gamer’s perspective. But it wasn’t until 2003 that I really started to gain a deep love and understanding of the game. See I was on a business trip in Las Vegas and the relationship manger of the vendor product we utilized was a poker player. He wasn’t playing the home style poker I had experienced throughout my childhood. Instead, he was playing the casino style poker with real clay chips and even a professional dealer. This wasn’t the old school cowboy style of poker in which the dealer calls their own game. This was an extremely structured poker like a professional organizers closet. There were clear betting amounts, blinds, and other unknown players. He encouraged me to try and play in one of those casino poker games with him. It was like I was an adult learning how to ride a motorcycle after much earlier years of only riding a bicycle. The games were fast, the strategy more intense, and the thinking much deeper. To truly understand the edges, you had to dig deep through every puzzle box. You had to try and guess what your opponent was thinking you were thinking so you could play the opposite. Coincidentally this was the same year that an amateur and unknown player Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker to start the explosion of the poker craze.

From that moment forward, I was completely hooked. I become so enamored with the game of poker that it became my lifelong dream to make my sole income from this game. I loved that every table seemed like the Harvard of recreation. I loved that you could see the soul of a man when he took a bad beat. And finally, I truly loved both the social aspect as well as the competition.

To this day, after years of moderate success and more frequent failures, I have not given up on the pursuit of this dream. I continue to attempt to fulfill a dream that I have failed at countless times in the past. So keep watching those poker events on ESPN. Just one day you could see me front and center of the poker world stage.

With that example hanging out there, I will close with this… don’t attempt those things that you would attempt if you could not fail… attempt those things that you would attempt in spite of failure. If you do that, when you ultimately succeed, you will be smiling big and you will have dreamed bigger.

The Elephant Sized Brick

Tags

courage, do it now, dream, dream bigger, dreams, jump, living life to the fullest, smile big, write

Since my grandmother died I have been thinking a lot about life and living it to the fullest. In fact, so much so that I haven’t had the courage to type out a blog entry. My fingers have been stuck like lead feet in quicksand. So here I go with not a topic to tackle and not a thought to share. Everything I read though states you should always write even when you don’t feel the urge to write. I apologize in advance if this entry twists and curves with no boundaries or clear destination.

More and more every day I feel the urge to jump from the safety of the job ship into the vast ocean of risk. My wife and kids, although I love them dearly, continue to be the only shackles that lock me down from the jump. The sands of regret are starting to bury me. It started with my feet and is creeping ever closer to my chest. I only hope the risk ocean can free me from the heavy sand before regret buries me alive. Because life is short and the days are even shorter.

It’s hard to tell people what to confront when you yourself are not ready for the battle. But go for it, do it now… especially if you are young and have weaker chains holding you down. If you have larger chains, maybe even an elephant sized brick, you can still do it. You need to crash through the wall of fear because there is a rainbow made of gold on the other side. There will always be excuses. The older you get the more the excuses will grow, like a tapeworm feeding on your dreams. I wish I could do it for you, but I definitely can’t. I am still preparing to take the ocean sized leap myself. I will, however, share with you a short video that has helped me crawl one baby inch closer to facing the risks head on.

The Time You Have Left (In Jelly Beans)

Hopefully that helped put things in perspective. Here’s hoping you will take that leap of faith today to minimize the regrets of tomorrow. Try, try your best to Smile Big and Dream Bigger.

The Dream Master’s Message Lives On!

Tags

50 years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., dream, dream master, I have a dream

I can’t exactly have a blog about following your dreams without posting and addressing who I consider the master of dreams. While this post maybe shorter than most it is definitely not due to lack of importance. Based on the date, you have probably realized that I am speaking of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 50 years ago, today, on the steps of Lincoln Memorial Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. He not only had a dream for himself but a dream for humanity. And while he may have been specifically addressing issues in the United States of America, his message was much broader than the reach of our country.

While some of these issues of discrimination still exist today, much of the bounced check he referenced in his speech has successfully been cashed. The other part we are waiting to see about the final delivery of funds.

Long before I took up blogging I admired this man. He was a hero to me even though he died prior to my birth. I have a row of books containing his speeches and essays. These are words, so eloquently written and so important, that I still cherish them today.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. demonstrated how some of the toughest dreams can be fulfilled. In his speech he not only speaks about the urgency of acting today, but also about what this dream’s fulfillment will do for the citizens of tomorrow.

This dream speech should be reviewed by everyone and cherished by all dreamers. This includes you, your children, and your children’s children. It’s that important. It has broad implications for us as individuals and for us as humanity.

It is with this message that I encourage you to read it often and watch its delivery. It very well may be the most concrete dream roadmap ever imagined. I watched and read it today. It has once again brought a large smile to my face and reminded of the importance of dreaming even larger.

Running Down a Dream – A Quick Exercise

Tags

Down, dream, Exercise, Grid, Running

If you are like me, you have so many dreams and aspirations that you sometimes don’t know where to start. Sometimes the hardest step is the first one. Well I believe I have devised a quick exercise that will help you focus your energy on which dream to start going after first. If you only have one main dream you are shooting for, then you don’t need this exercise and should probably stop reading and start doing. Take that one step closer to that you dream you are going after. For the rest of you who do need some help, here are the instructions:

1. Take 5 minutes to write down everything you dream of accomplishing. This is a no holds barred, free form stream of thought. Just let it all out, every dream you wish you could achieve. No dream is too small and no dream is too big. It can be something as simple and vague as being a better mother, to something concrete and difficult such as becoming an Olympic Champion Gymnast. Make sure you only use 5 minutes as that will capture your key dreams and your list won’t be so broad that you are overwhelmed. Do this step NOW! Do it before moving to step two of the exercise. If you look at the rest of the steps before finishing step one, the exercise won’t be as valuable.

2. Ok, now that you have your list, make three columns next to the items. In the first column, rate each item on an importance scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being not that important and 10 being extremely important. You can use a number more than once since you most likely have more than 10 items. In other words, there may be multiple sixes or multiple fours, etc.

3. In the second column, rate each item on an achievability scale, with 1 being extremely difficult to achieve and 10 being extremely easy to achieve.

Note: You may want to create a 1 to 20 scale for step two and three depending on the number of dreams you have listed. The largest the list, the better off you will be with this larger scale.

4. Add each row and use the third column as a total for each dream. For example, one dream may have received a 4 on the importance scale and a 6 on the achievability scale. So the total score for that dream would be 10.

5. Once you have a total for each dream, order them from the highest score to the lowest score. If you happen to have two that received the same score, then review the two and decide which is most important to you.

You may want to put your final version on a spreadsheet especially if you lean towards being analytical. Below is a sample spreadsheet of my own finalized version:

Some of you may scoff at this idea and think it is too systematic. I totally understand and this exercise is not for everyone. This exercise may not even help you decide which dream to tackle first. The exercise should help you focus your energy if you get stuck or are not sure which dream to start with and which initial actions to take. Of course I have a lot of ideas for creating a road map for each dream but I will reserve those ideas for another time.

Until then… Smile Big and Dream Bigger!