You have to fuel your own vision

When I was younger, I used to think that it was enough to have a good idea. After all, we tell kids that good ideas can lead to great things happening. After years of failing, I started to realize that it doesn’t really matter how smart your mom thinks you are, how successful you were in your last job or how much you think you deserve to “make it.” It’s not the job of other people to empower your dreams. Will it happen sometimes? You betcha. But it’s not a bet you can make nor should you gamble your life away assuming that someone else is going to show up recognizing the intrinsic abilities you possess and try to help you get there.

It’s all about timing. But it’s more than that, too. You’ve got to bring your A game more often than not and when it’s prime-time, you just have to be ready. Sometimes, it won’t come all at once. It’ll be a slow crescendo that rises up from nowhere. Maybe it happens so fast you didn’t even know it while it was going on. But the biggest thing I’ve come to accept over the years is that you can’t expect anyone else to embrace your vision.

If they did, it’d cease to be yours. Or they’ll screw it up and annoy you, when really, it’s just your fault. Too much of this stuff starts earlier than we realize. So when you ask someone how they became an overnight success, they tell you a story about when they were six. Or nine years old doing that thing they loved. Or how they transitioned at a certain point, committed themselves to it and good things came about to the point that they’re talking to you.

There have been far more eloquent folks who’ve tackled this topic in a far less impromptu manner than I am right now. So much of the rhetoric these days rests on blaming someone else for what didn’t work out how we wanted it to go. It just seems misplaced. Are there structural problems with certain things? Yup. Are there people who exist in the same places we live, work and play who have legitimate grievances and don’t even know it? You betcha.

Success isn’t a pill and it doesn’t come in the form of a piece of paper. You have to define it for yourself. It might not be what your neighbor wanted for her life, it might not be what your dad wanted for his. That’s okay, because so long as you’re excited to wake up everyday working towards whatever this thing might be…there’s not much more you can ask for than that.

It can be disappointing when we’re not where we want to be at a particular point. I know I think about this a lot and try to find the words to describe it; but I usually don’t have them. Resilience comes from recognizing that if you’re still in the ring, that you have to keep fighting or else you need to find a new thing to do.

Tomorrow is a new day and what happens isn’t entirely up to me. But there are things I can do to make it the best day possible and you can best believe that I’ll do that tomorrow as I did today, yesterday and the days, months and weeks before.

Ultimately, all you’ve got is your ideas. Bring them to life or spend your days daydreaming and wondering “what if?”

You have to make your own path

I have this habit of checking the ages of prominent people to see how old they are. Then I’ll count back to the number of years in the bio to when it seemed they were normal. If they’re a decade older, it usually makes me feel a bit better and then I feel like I still have time.

My entire professional career and personal life have been subconsciously driven in this manner for a bit too long. I’m admitting it here because I’ve read enough “go empowered millennials!” blogs to figure that I’m not the only one. But even if I were, it’s worth sharing anyway.

There was once a time when my professional life seemed to be skyrocketing. I was riding a fairly epic win streak and even when there were losses, it seemed bigger wins were emerging out of the woodwork. I thought I was doing everything right, I felt beyond empowered and like most things in life; it was just getting figured out.

I remember the first professional job I got out of college was funny. The minute I got a business card with a college on it and people found out I worked at the local community college, they all wanted my advice.

“Hey, my computer is doing this.”

“Can you build me a web site?”

“What do you think of all of this Facebook business? Should my daughter be on it who is 11?”

I laughed and thought that all of the attention was weird. I mean, I didn’t get any smarter when someone gave me an office and said “have at it.” But it went that way off and on again for a while. Before too long, people wanted to hear what I had to say or at least, acted like it. It was a pretty fun time.

I don’t really miss those days now, to be honest. I mean, it never felt all that comfortable. I do my best work behind the scenes. While I make a decent candidate, I’m far better as the architect you don’t hear from until it’s necessary to get a point across. In the business of web strategy, teaching is something that comes naturally. I like demystifying the web to the point where people ask, “wait, if it’s this easy why do we need you?” 

The future could be composed with many different things. I can go in a lot of different directions. I feel a certain desire to build on what I’ve done to this point. But on the flip side, I want more.

I’m sort of reluctant to say a lot, because it’s akin to taking the wrong turn using GPS, you find yourself recalculating to get back on track. The lack of context this platform provides is a blessing and a curse at the same time. So my goal, in a sense, is to start fleshing the story out more. It’s hard to take people back, so I’d rather take myself forward and just help people fill in the blanks as we go along. 

It’d be one thing if I had a caustic background with lots of red flags. Or if my story were that of someone who didn’t have a lot to offer. I’ve learned a lot over the years and I’ve gained a lot of perspective along the way and a ton of experiences that I simply wouldn’t have had sticking to a conventional path.

What I’ve come to realize is the only way to really get yourself where you want to be, is to know it and pursue it earnestly. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. But you can’t measure yourself with someone else’s scale and wonder why it doesn’t work for you.

It never will.