This week's book: "What’s Your Dream?" by Simon Squibb.
"If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."
- Henry David Thoreau
What's your dream? It's a simple question, and Squibb's whole point is that almost none of us ever actually stop to ask. We're handed one path early, do well in school, get the respectable job, avoid failure, and we follow it so diligently that we never look up and ask what we truly want out of this one life we’ve been given.
Squibb earned the right to ask and then acted. He was homeless at fifteen, started his first business doing gardening work, and years later built and sold a company for more money than he says he'll ever need. Now he spends his days helping other people start their dreams, famously stopping strangers on the street with a microphone to ask them that exact question. He lived it, and now he gives it away. That's my kind of guy!
His argument is that a dream isn't a luxury or a distraction from real life. It's the thing that makes the work worth doing, and most of us have, for some dumb reason, quietly and sheepishly buried ours under everyone else's rules.
Here's the promise for the week: by Saturday you'll have a clearer picture of your own dream, a sense of why the “usual” path talks us out of it, and one small step you can actually take toward it. “To build momentum, you start with the smallest step that meets the least resistance.
I'll be honest, this one hits close to home. All Star Mentors is my own answer to this exact question, found late and on purpose, after a lot of years on somebody else's treadmill.
So, quick question to start the week: what's your dream? Even a rough, half-formed one counts. Hit reply, I read every one.
I'll go first: mine is this, right here. Helping people find the practical wisdom to build a life they're genuinely glad to wake up to. It took me a lot of years and plenty of wrong turns to be able to say it that plainly.
Reading ahead?
Next week we're reading "Beyond Belief" by Nir Eyal with Julie Li. If you like to follow along, now's a good time to grab a copy so it's on your shelf by Monday. Forgot to order in time? The Kindle version is instant.
If someone forwarded you this, you can get the daily insights free at www.allstarmentors.com.
Talk tomorrow,
Mike
Practical wisdom for the life you're building