Thread by @awesome_john

I was up early this morning (thanks chest pain), and it got me thinking.

So today's thread is about pursuing your dreams.

I cannot stress this loud enough, I could not possibly say this often enough, but if you have something you want to do, some thing you want to make, some person you want to talk to, some goal you want to achieve - go do it.

No, it's not easy. But that doesn't mean don't do it.

I look at my adult life and I see a few clear schisms, a few moments where I had very little choice but to change and change hard, because I had boxed myself into some kind of corner.

These are also the moments when I strayed farthest from my dreams.

When I was a a shitty young adult on the internet joining in on shitty activities with shitty toxic people, how close was I to really doing what I wanted? (Which at the time was being a writer in residence at a small university)

Hint - I was light-years away from it.

When I was high everyday and doing dumb shit to keep getting high and staying loaded because life was hard and I was scared to own my feelings and it felt like my brain was tearing itself apart, where was I in relation to my goal of being a TV writer?

Totally far out.

And now looking downhill on life, having finally found some measure of congruence between helping people and being good to myself and maybe making a few dollars to feel like a contributing member of a society, yes, there are days when my goals still feel far away.

But unlike before, unlike me at 21, at 28, at 31, or even 35, I can point to stuff I'm actually doing every day to get from here to there.

I open the office. I sit down at this laptop. And I will spill my guts, my heart, and my brain to anyone who might be out there.

A goal you want to accomplish isn't suddenly worthless or bad because it's big or radically different than where you are now.

You want to write a book.
You want to be a good adult.
You want to see Vienna.

Having the dream isn't the problem - it's the doing something.

See, if you're not careful, if you're not paying attention some second because you're busy, your brain manufactures plenty of reasons that your dream is impossible for you.

You can't write that book ... you don't know how to start.

You can't go to Vienna, you're in Idaho.

So this tension gets built up, this pressure because you really want that dream, and it's not bad to want things.

But your brain is firing all these chemical electric messages of doubt and fear because it expects the distance between here and there to be huge and difficult.

Because in order to reach that goal, you'll probably have to change something, and brains fear change, because changing habits means changing brain wiring and chemicals and that could (gasp!) be uncomfortable.

You want to go to Vienna? You have to save money. You might have to forgo that afternoon candy. And you like that candy bar, because your job sucks and six mouthfuls of chocolate help you regularly feel better.

I know.

But Vienna's the goal.

So you skip that chocolate.

Or you get up twenty minutes earlier to write because that book is in your head and it deserves to be on pages somewhere.

Yes, it sucks to not have the candy or to be awake. Yes, changing your schedule is hard.

But the goal's worth it, right?

Young-me would tell you that you have to plow through every obstacle and go to extraordinary lengths to get your goal.

Young me was also frequently high.

Now me will tell you that many obstacles are of your own design, and adaptation and progress are extraordinary.

The toughest part of my day is from 8:55am to 8:59am.

The four minutes before I open the office. The four minutes I take to gather all my ducks in a row and get my head on straight.

The four minutes where I have to stop thinking about what's wrong and find my goal.

Because brains can be shitboxes, they get used to feeling and expecting to feel certain ways and they'll through up any kind of signal they can to drive you back to "comfortable" space.

Even if that comfortable space is all applesauce.

Stay where you are, don't write, don't travel. Don't say that, stay quiet. Just google and daydream and avoid that risk and rejection and that expense and here are 45 other reasons why you should just not change your habits or take action.

It's all bullshit.

The only way, the absolutely only way you're going to achieve your dream(s), whatever they might be, is by you taking some kind of action to get from where you are to a point nearer to where you want to be.

Maybe that means you change who you hang out with.
Maybe that means you prune the social media.
Maybe that means you make a new effort to start or stop doing something.
Maybe that means you gotta choose every day at 8:55 in the morning not to give up.

And you can come at me with all the quantum philosophy you want, that like attracts like, that you need Pinterest boards and altars, and that's cool if that works for you.

But everyone's gotta first come to that point where they choose they're gonna take the steps forward.

For me, that's writing things down. Not just a to-do list, but a what-I-want-from-today list.

Not the numbers, not the metrics, not checking the bank account once every 11 minutes. Those are my traps. I found them because I looked for them.

I mean goals. On the page.

Concretizing them, choosing them, expressing them deliberately, even if nobody but the NSA and the Amazon Echo and my iPhone are hearing them, makes me have to think about what I need to do to go get them done today.

One of the worst things young-me used to do was think that my goal was only ever one step away and I'd be forever not-good-enough to figure out what that one step was, especially when it looked like everyone else knew what to do and wasn't telling me.

Horseshit.

When a goal is just one step away, you go get it.

But impatience about a goal is what keeps you from getting there.

It's not about "Am I good enough" it's "Do I know what step I can take today, and am I going to take it?"

Courage. Choice.

Don't abandon your goals or relegate them to "only daydream status."

With a good plan, with patience, with effort, you can accomplish anything.

We put people on the fucking moon. We painted ceilings. We invented froyo and the potato skin.

It's possible, one step at a time.

Johnfession - any convention where I don't have anything to do is an absolute anxiety engine. If I don't have to be somewhere to speak, so I don't have anything to rehearse or feel confident about, I am hella uncomfortable.

And yet here I am, putting socks in a suitcase.

Because my goal (As it is on the page) is "Pack for Nebulas" and I promised Jess I would do it before lunch and I keep my promises to her because I don't like when she makes that disappointed face and then tells me I should go rest.

Also, if I let her pack for me, she picks all the wrong t-shirts and then insists on folding them after I worked very hard on trying my best to fold them myself.

It's a thing you guys.

But I have this goal, so I'm going for it.

Are there goals after that?

Yes.

But I'm not there yet, so I'm not doing them yet.

See today's blogpost - writernextdoor.com/think-short-pl…

for more.

Okay, back to packing. Thanks for letting me ramble at you.