“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” – Lao Tzu

Have you ever read a wonderful piece of advice and then completely failed to implement it?

I’ve recently been looking a lot of advice in the face and asking, “Why bother?”

All those gurus sitting in their white castles don’t know the details of your life. You might be a single mom with two young children, or a young graduate desperately trying to get noticed at work and with the ladies. You’re going through so much in life already that you don’t see why you should waste time trying to implement someone else’s advice, no matter how sound it seems.

In addition, most advice is uncomfortable to implement. It takes time, energy and resources, and you already have enough demands on them: from work, family and friends. You weigh the pros and cons subconsciously, and come to the decision it’s not worth it. The advice you nodded along with gets forgotten. “It sounds great,” you say, “but I couldn’t do it.”

We don’t bother to analyse why we’re not trying to implement those tips the gurus say are worthwhile, and we put it down to laziness. But it’s really not laziness, it’s just a lack of motivation. We don’t do anything till we decide that we really, really want that thousand-mile journey. And self development is a really long journey, so why bother? No matter how much other people say that it’s important to be better, richer, healthier, smart, more productive… you shouldn’t bother unless you think that goal is important.

Take waking up early, for instance. A few years back this was the rage among productivity bloggers, and then someone came along and said it doesn’t work for him. Do you wake up early? If you answered no, it’s probably because you’re not sufficiently motivated: there are lots of things that can be done at night or on the commute, and sleeping in is so much fun! However, it’s easy to wake in time for something that can only be done early in the morning: that’s why most people who love sleeping in still manage to catch their early morning flights, and most employees make it to work by 9.

Some things just don’t seem worth it. I’ve read lots of house cleaning tips, but my place stays a mess: I can live with mess as long as it doesn’t attract bugs or get underfoot – my day is too crammed to make room for obsessive mopping.

You can never go down the road towards self-improvement till you identify what you love, and what your own goals are. It doesn’t have to resonate with anyone else: if you’re a recent grad you can admit to yourself that you want to get a job in an investment bank, make lots of money, work heaps, and retire early; you don’t have to join a non-profit, you can make the world better just by being yourself. It’s your life, you don’t have to justify your dreams to anyone else. Someone else might be on a weight-loss journey, but if you’re fine with being slightly overweight for the moment, don’t feel guilty: understand why it’s like that (other priorities maybe) and whether you plan to tackle your weight later. Don’t feel the need to be like someone else; another person’s goals will never matter to you.

The first real step in a journey is introspection: deciding what journey you want. I’ve done some soul-searching myself, before deciding to take baby steps down the self-improvement path. These are the areas that I’ve decided I want to improve upon, and that I’ll be discussing in my blog. Check if any of these goals fit in with your own goals:

1. Career Optimization
   Unless you’re acting immorally, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to earn money – it lets you raise children, support your family, donate to the needy and enjoy life a little. However, my primary motivator is working at something I’m passionate about, so I’m happy making a small income that allows me to survive without handouts.
   I write about following your passion, and it’s a wonderful life when you can merge your career and passion. For some people (including me) this may take a while to achieve, and it’s ok to build up a nest egg by working hard at a job you don’t dream about. Your job will take up most of your life, and it’s important to try to enjoy it, do well at it, and leverage it as much as possible without dying inside.
2. Frugality
   I equate wealth with freedom. Money doesn’t mean a flashy car for me, it means time to devote to work I love rather than work that just pays. Wealth can bring security, comfort, experiences… and income generation is only one part of the equation.
   I was forced to be extremely frugal after a lifestyle change led to two people living on a tiny income, and it’s taught me a lot – mostly that frugality isn’t painful. When you have a vision of what you want from life (travelling, being with your kids, starting a business) wasteful consumerism fades into the background. That’s not to say that you should live a miserable stingy life. It’s just that I believe that frugality can help you achieve your longer-term goals by eliminating the stuff you don’t really want.
3. Healthiness
   This is one of the more difficult goals since it involves abstaining from foods you love and undertaking strenuous activity when you’d rather do something else. This is something I’ve thought long and hard about, and I’ve talked about how I do it. It’s totally worth it for me – I feel more energetic, and tend to fall ill less often. However, without sufficient determination, it’s difficult to try to be healthier.
4. Happiness
   Gretchen Rubin says her year of trying to be happier did, in fact, make her happier. The surprising thing is that being happier is not necessarily easy: it involves an amount of restraint, selfless giving, work and social interactions. At the end of the day though, I’d rather be happy and exhausted.
5. Productivity
   What is the point of doing meaningless work quicker?
   I was totally disinterested in productivity hacks until I discovered what I really wanted to do with my life. Sure, you can apply some tips to improve your social life, but most tips are work related – and before trying to go through tips for working better, make sure you want to be doing that work. Of course, if there’s something you look forward to doing outside of work you can try to work more efficiently to have more time to devote to that activity. Productivity is closely tied with career optimization.

Everyone’s journey is different. Before you read about how to have a more efficient journey, it’s important to think about which journey you want. Hopefully this post will inspire you to do that.

Related posts:

1. How to Integrate Your Dreams and Your Life
2. Don’t Be Scared of Obstacles!
3. Why is it so Hard to Lose Weight? My Giant List of Weight-Loss Tips

These are the steps that I took to follow my dream, although I didn’t so much “take” the first few steps as get a sudden push!

1. Realization
   One fine day I realized it’s possible to follow my dreams.
   This was a shock to me, since I’d become jaded over time, and had started to think that I would be going down a “traditional” life – trying the corporate world, possibly not being that successful since I wasn’t about to work 15hour days in Corporateland, and having a “typical” life.
   Then one day I understood that I don’t have to do it if I don’t want to. I live a very frugal life, so I don’t have to earn very much. Even a part-time role would pay enough to cover my bills, and I could spend the rest of my time chasing whatever dream I had. Whatever dream I had.
2. Acceptance
   The next stage for me was accepting that I wasn’t really on track to the most fantastic life ever. Seeing a future in Corporateland didn’t excite me. Suddenly it was clear to me that my life wasn’t the awe-inspiring journey that it could be, and I should possibly think about changing its course.
3. Understanding
   Once I realized that I wanted to do something different, I had to understand what I wanted to do. Why did I want out of the suburban dream? What did my dream life look like? It wasn’t just the things I would ideally have, or how much money I would make, but what kind of things did I love to do?
4. Dreaming big
   When I was younger I had wanted to be a novelist. I also wanted to be an entrepreneur.I started dreaming wild dreams about what my ideal daily work would be like. From this, I started to narrow things down. What business did I want to be in? Did I still want to be a novelist or did I just want to write? What kind of things did I want to write? Did I have any other dreams? For instance, I’m very interested in business and marketing – did I maybe want to be a consultant, or write about business? I like design, so did I want some kind of design career, may as an interior designer? Or did I want to write about interior design? As you can see, there were so many possible combinations! At this stage I felt overwhelmed! I hadn’t done this kind of exercise since I was a child, and I suddenly realized that there was a whole world out there that I could possibly explore!
   Around about this point I decided to take a step back and be a bit more realisitic. Following your dreams is a bit like trying to have a relationship – you may like some potential career, but it may not like you. It may like people with a skill set completely different to yours.
   So I started trying to find “the one”. Again, like dating, there is no Mr Perfect – because there’s no-one out there who’s perfect. But there is a Mr Right, because there are people out there who are right for you. For possible careers that really appealed to me, I drew up lists of pros and cons.
   Just because a career is a dream for you, doesn’t mean that it’s without it’s drawbacks. Once more, I can’t leave the analogy of a partner – just because you love someone it doesn’t mean they don’t have their flaws. At this stage, I was taking a long hard look at the cons, and trying to decide which ones I could live with. Essentially, I was doing a cost-benefit analysis of different career options, and trying to weigh how much I would get out of a career and how much I would have to put in, and what different things meant to me. For instance, I chose blogging about personal development, money and happiness because although the hours are quite a lot and the pay is much lower than what I could make in other careers, the potential satisfaction of a job well done is much higher.
5. Be determined
   I’m putting this in as an extra step, because I needed to take a deep breath and decide that I would take the plunge. In fact, I’ve needed to take a couple of such deep breaths every few days, whenever I come across a little voice that says I’m doing something crazy and I’ll fail miserably and become an icon of stupidity. You need to have the determination to face down that little potent voice.
6. Put in the effort
   This where most people fail.
   It’s simply not practical to chase a dream when your life is already full with a career, a relationship, friends, family and maybe some other hobbies. Changing or starting a new career takes a whole lot of effort. How can you carve out time for that effort? Would you be able to maybe reduce your work hours and withstand a temporary cut in pay, would your partner/family support your dream? This stage actually takes a lot of preparation, trying to figure out how to put in that effort, and making a realistic assessment of how much you need to put in. It’s all right to say that you just don’t have the time for this: if you realize it upfront, you’ll have saved yourself a lot of wasted effort, and can maybe look into some other way to integrate your dream into your life.If you’ve got your plans set up already (e.g. become an interior designer by enrolling in a part-time course and helping out a designer for free on the weekends), are you really going to be able to put in the required effort?
   If the answer to all those questions is yes, the only thing to do now is go ahead and stick it out.
7. Monetize
   This is the very last step, and it only comes about if you’ve taken all the other steps. It may be a long and winding road to get there, but it ultimately happens. Of course, even after monetizing, you may not be able to make too much money. For instance, with this blog, I don’t have grandiose money-generating schemes, but if I make enough to cover my bills, the satisfaction of creating a good blog will be enough.

Quite a few things become apparant to me when I look back over this exercise.

Firstly, this exercise in following your dreams is only worth doing if you’re not satisfied with how your life’s going at the moment. If you’re already living the dream, congratulations!

If you think your life could do with a bit of a shakeup, it’s worth noting that most people have quite a few things that they love doing. For instance, you may love yoga, knitting and reading. So right there, you have a couple of potential career avenues. Some people say that they don’t know what their passion is, but I think very few people have one single passion. Some people have become so busy and immersed with their current life that they can’t remember anything that they really love doing.
There are a number of steps that you can take to uncover things that you love (hopefully I’ll have a blog post coming out on this shortly). But usually, it’s a number of different things. In fact, your dream may seem completely boring to someone else – for instance, I love marketing and business strategy and was seriously considering becoming a small-business consultant.

Another question that pops up is, what does it mean to follow your dream? It may be more suitable for some people to have a corporate job and a hobby. Just because you love doing something doesn’t mean that you should try to make it your career. I love yoga, but I could never make it my career – I would rather practice it than teach it, and I don’t see myself putting in eight hours a day of effort into it.

If you choose to try to make money from something you love, there are a number of ways you could go about it. You could teach it, you could practice it, you could sell products about it. Another example to clarify this: I love interior design. So I could try to set a blog with home design tips, or I could set up a magazine about interior design, showcasing recent works. I could try to be a designer myself. Or I could set up a shop selling home design items.
Maybe you love golf. You could try to be a pro golfer, you could try being a golf coach at a country club, you write an educational newsletter or book about golf, you could sell golf supplies, or you could cover golf tournaments and blog about golf gossip.

As I mentioned in my previous post, you may find out that you can’t really create a career around one particular thing you love. It may just not be practical enough: the cons would outweigh any benefits. For instance, you may like airplanes, but it may not be practical for you to want to be a pilot because firstly, flying lessons are expensive, and secondly, being a pilot means a lot of travel and you don’t want to spend lots of time away from your young family.

A lot of people don’t initially make their dream their full-time career. It’s most likely to take a while to make money from a career move: there may be some time required for education, looking for work, or setting up a business. This is where the concept of a “day job” comes in. Basically, a day job is a stress-free job that pays the bills, that you can fit your other “dream” career around. Often, this is a bit of a dead end job. This is the route I’ve taken. Having worked in call centres for a bit, I’ve seen quite a few hopeful actors, models and musicians choose this path as well. After all, it’s nice to not have to worry about bills, but a “proper” job is often too draining to do anything else afterwards. Another option to make your dream a reality is to work hard at a stressful job, save up, and “retire” early to pursue your ideal career.

Whichever option you choose, and however you choose to go about it, I believe that it is possible to work at something you love. At least, I hope I don’t fall flat on my face and prove myself wrong.

Related posts:

1. Self Improvement – Why Bother?
2. How to Follow Your Passion