What Are You Willing to Give Up to Have What You Want?

Over at the Mastery TV community I manage on Google+,  I was talking about how I gave up on my goal, my dream really, to move to a small cottage in Gainesville in August of this year because I wanted to focus solely on my son's wedding. At first, I was convinced I could do both -- then (of course) the unexpected happened. I was working for a crowdsourcing company that had all the work I could possibly want or need, so my goals were on track, and I knew I could do what I wanted to do. Suddenly, they decided to give us a two-week break to take care of a backlog of articles they needed to edit. All the work dried up, and as much as I tried to soldier on, I realized that this small change in  my earning ability was going to cause me a lot of trouble with my goal. You see, I had no other income source that could quickly take the place of that client for those two weeks. I had lots of eggs in my basket, but they were medium to small eggs. I was all out of extra-large eggs. The golden goose was sick with the flu and the bantam hens just couldn't keep up the needed production.

So I got out my spreadsheet (I'm a planner. I love spreadsheets) and my calculator and I went to work. I figured that instead of working 5 days a week, I would have to work 6 days a week to get my cottage and get to Chicago for the wedding.

The problem was, I knew that wasn't physically possible for me.

I have lupus, and after much kicking, screaming and railing at God, I've come to accept my limitations. There are things I just can't do without causing real harm to myself, and working 60 hour weeks is one of them.

I was focused, I had it all planned out, but it just wasn't going to happen. So I spent a day wallowing around in self-pity (which is totally acceptable, by the way) and then I changed my focus.

My focus was now to put myself into a financial situation where this will never happen again, where I will never have to give up a dream of a goal because I'm not earning enough money to get there. Instead of downsizing my dream, I was simply postponing it and building a better base to build that dream.

So that is my story. Boring, right? Work smarter, not harder, blah, blah, blah. There is a problem with that theory. The problem is that I have been "postponing" my dreams all my life, just putting them off one more day, one more month, one more year and I somehow never get there. So I'm changing my focus again, making a new plan, and here is why.

While searching for something to post to Mastery TV today, I found a TEDx video from a brilliant young man named Adam Baker, owner of the Man vs. Debt blog. I probably should have already heard of this blog, because I'm way into the mommy and daddy parenting blogger community, but somehow I had missed it. The tagline for his blog is "Sell your crap, pay off your debt, do what you love." It's a great blog and you should check it out. If you want to see the video, you'll have to go over to Mastery TV, which you should do anyway, because it's a great site and Google+ is the best social platform ever. Here's the link. Enjoy!

Oh, and when you watch this, you'll know a little about my new plan. Tomorrow, I'll tell you more.