Have you ever felt like giving up on your dreams? By the end of today’s episode, you’ll not only not want to give up on your dreams, but you’ll also feel re-energized in pursuing them.
KEY POINTS
You’re Ready Now! – Committing before you think you’re ready is a skill. You may never fully be ready so why not commit now? Pursuing your dreams requires you to take action even when you don’t think you’re ready.
Think big! – Thinking big gets you excited to achieve your goals, you’re more likely to pursue them when excited.
Expect Failure – Failure is actually how you learn and grow.
The Only Failure is Failing to Try – Better to have tried and failed than to wonder what could have potentially happened.
What is Holding you Back? – Pursuing your dreams forces you to get real with yourself and confront any deficiencies that might be holding you back.
By pursuing your dreams, you open yourself up to a myriad of successes along the way.
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TRANSCRIPT
Have you ever felt like giving up on your dreams? Well, by the end of today’s episode, you’ll not only not want to give up on your dreams, but you’ll also feel re-energized in pursuing them. Hi, my name is Eric Partaker, and I’ve been recognized as one of the top entrepreneurs in the country, as well as the CEO of the year. I’m also the author of two best-selling books, including The 3 Alarms. And most importantly for you, I’ve helped thousands of people realize their full potential in work and life.
Pursuing your dreams comes with so many benefits and here are my top reasons for why you shouldn’t give up on pursuing your dreams. Number one, pursuing your dreams forces you to commit before you’re ready. If they’re your dreams, they’re going to be lofty ambitions, perhaps, that are quite distant from where you are today. And by committing before you’re ready, you’re actually helping yourself overcome one of the number one blocks to progress in someone’s life. And that’s when they think they need to have everything lined up, they need to be just ready. Everything’s perfect before they can actually commit and go after whatever it is that they’re hoping to achieve. But here’s the truth, you’ll never be fully ready and you’ll always constantly think of that next thing that you need to be learning or doing to make you feel just safe and secure. And by pursuing your dreams, once again, it’s forcing you to commit before you are ready, and that right there is a skill in and of itself.
Number two, by pursuing your dreams, it’s going to prompt you to think big. When I was helping build Skype before we sold it to eBay, one of our dreams was that the whole world could talk for free. And by thinking so big like that, we were inspired to do things that we normally wouldn’t have even considered in the absence of that dream. And by thinking big, it gets you excited. It gets you determined and feeling fulfilled and energized in your work. In the current work that I do, my mission is to help people join that 2% club, join that estimated 2% of people in the world who are operating at their full potential to break free from that 98%. And that once again is a dream that forces me to think big. How do we get 98% of the planet to join that 2% club? By thinking big, I get excited. And by getting excited, I’m more likely to pursue that, which I’m working towards.
The number three reason why you shouldn’t give up on your dreams is because of failure. And I know this might seem counter-intuitive. “Wait, you’re telling me not to give up on my dreams because by pursuing my dreams, it will cause me to fail?” Yes, because failure is actually how we learn and grow. Many of the people that you’ve come to respect perhaps only achieve what they achieve because of the failures that they went through.
Abraham Lincoln, for example, he lost that war, lost that politics, or initially lost at politic, but eventually became the president of the United States. Michael Jordan was actually cut from his high school basketball team at one point, but went on to become the greatest player ever in the game. So, it’s through failure that we actually become better. But if we don’t pursue our dreams, we have no chance to fail and then therefore we don’t have that chance to improve.
Number four reason why not to give up on your dreams. And this follows from the previous one about failure is that by pursuing your dreams, you develop what’s called grit or perseverance or persistence in the face of difficulty. And grit has been associated with high levels of success. People who have a lot of grit, they tend to achieve more, have more fulfilling lives, but you can’t experience grit unless you go through hardships. So, it’s the act of pursuing your dreams, maybe not achieving them at first, failing along the way, that not only allows you to eventually reach that dream, but then build grit, perseverance, persistence in the face of difficulty in the process, all of which are hugely beneficial and desirable attributes.
Number five reason for not giving up on your dreams is that it’s better to have tried and failed than to wonder what could have potentially happened. And what we’re really talking about here is regret. You don’t want to live a life where you always wonder what could have been because you never tried. I’d rather try at something and fail then wonder later, “Could I have tried? And maybe I would have succeeded.” So ask yourself, where are you potentially running the risk of regretting things later in life? And why not just try right now? And if you’re excited to start pursuing your dreams again, then let us know, give this video a like so that we know that this information is resonating with you.
Number six reason for not wanting to stop the pursuit of your dreams is that by pursuing your dreams, it prompts you to better use your time. Once again, your dreams are probably big things. They’re probably distant from where you currently are today, that’s the nature of dreams. And by shooting for something, by shooting for the moon, it gives us that sense that, “Wow, time is of the essence. I better make good use of it.” And pursuing dreams actually makes you more productive because you become hyper aware of where your time is going, if your time should be being spent in another area, rather than what you’re currently doing. So, becoming more aware of how you use your time is hugely beneficial, and that happens by default when we start pursuing our dreams.
The number seven reason for why you shouldn’t give up on your dreams is that all these unexpected gifts in the pursuit of your dreams will happen along the way. I’ve experienced this so many different times, I’m pursuing one thing and benefits in another area suddenly emerge. I end up meeting a person that I hadn’t expected to meet. I discover a new relationship or a new opportunity or path forward that I had never even anticipated. But all of that only happens along the journey, along the pursuit. And even if I don’t get to exactly where I had hoped to get to in the beginning, I end up still somewhere magical or better than where I was along the way, as a result of pursuing that dream.
The number eight reason is that by pursuing your dreams, it forces you to get real with yourself and confront any deficiencies, anything within you that might be holding you back from the dream that you hope to realize. Let me give you a quick example. When I was building one of my companies as a founder, I recognized a lot of gaps in my leadership, which I voiced with my coach at the time. And he said, “Well, you should go for this CEO of the Year Award,” which I thought was a little bit overkill for wanting to shore up a few gaps in my leadership ability. But sure enough, by pursuing that big lofty goal, it forced me to do things that I never would have considered otherwise.
This dream prompted massive action in a way. I ended up interviewing top performing CEOs to understand what drove their success. I read a lot about leadership and personal development and did 360s, or basically gathered feedback from the rest of my team, and that all culminated in receiving that CEO of the Year recognition. But none of that would have happened had I not gotten real with my own deficiencies and then sought to confront them as I did.
Number nine, by pursuing your dreams, you open yourself up to a myriad of successes along the way. And what do I mean? Because a dream, once again, will probably be, as I’ve said before, this lofty thing, or perhaps much bigger or distant from where you currently are. And there will naturally be so many stepping stones along the way, stepping stones in your learning and development, stepping stones and new relationships that you make. All forms and types of different successes that you couldn’t have anticipated, but that you get to experience by pursuing those dreams of yours.
So, the headline message here is, there are lots of reasons why you should not give up the pursuit of your dreams. Pursuing those dreams of yours creates so many benefits in you or life. And I’d love to hear from you, so don’t forget to leave a comment and a rating as well. And if you’d like to get a copy of my new book, The 3 Alarms, please head over to my website at ericpartaker.com. That’s E-R-I-C, ericpartaker.com, where you can pick up a free digital copy of my new best-selling book, The 3 Alarms.
