Life Is Too Short To Live Without Passion.

What are you passionate about? Can you define your dream in a sentence? Do you know why you are doing what you are doing every day? Are you excited about what your day holds? Or are you going through the motions, working for Friday, watching the clock, and just working for a paycheck?

Are you working your job or business, or Chasing your Dream? The difference in the two is the magic of life.

Our Creator designed us to be dreamers, "Without a Dream my people perish."

It has always been that most people do not have a dream, or purpose to their lives. Ben Franklin once said that "Most men die at 25 only to be buried at 65." Thoreau said, "Most men live lives of quiet desperation." Most people long ago gave up on their dreams of childhood, maybe because so many people told them to grow up.

I was thinking of this the other day in a conversation with a friend who was talking about trying to find the passion in her kids, trying to find that thing that would light them up. Wanting to get them around other kids of passion who they could feed off of to keep their own fires burning. Of course this makes sense, but as we were speaking the question is don't adults need this association with winners every bit as much? At what age are we no longer influenced positively or negatively by those we associate? As Zig Ziglar calls it SNIOPed, "Susceptible to the Negative Influences of Other People." Of course that answer is we never grow out of this, we are always influenced by those we choose to hang around.

This became even more clear to me as I am rereading "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand. While it is a political thriller, that clearly shows the dangers of an overarching government, and a compliant population, it also shows the distinction from the dreamers and drones.

We may believe that we can lift them out of negativity, and into our passion, but in most cases unless you have others who share your passion you will see your own diminish rather than lift the others up.

One log doesn't make a fire. If you take one log and try to light it, you won't have much success. If you build a stack of logs and then build a fire even the biggest log will burn. Once you have a hot fire you can even put a wet log and it will dry and catch fire. However, if you take a log that is burning red hot and take it out of the fire to let it burn by itself it will soon go out.

Find a Dream, find a passion, then nurture it. Find others who are following a similar passion and feed off each other. In the economic climate we have been experiencing far too many people and companies are imitating the turtle pulling back into their shells trying to ride out the danger. They are hunkering down, holding back, hanging on, surviving, hiding in fear, not attacking with passion. It can very much become a habit, how many times have you heard sports analogies where they question if a team can "turn it on," after a lackluster performance.
Zig Ziglar speaks of a lesson he learned as a kid when he went to the neighbor's to see if he could get something to eat from their family's cook. When she brought the pan of biscuits out of the oven they were all flat and burnt. He asked her what happened, her response was "It looks like they squatted to rise, then got cooked in the squat." How many of our friends and associates are those biscuits?

My own journey through this economic malaise was dealing with company after company that was hanging on, some surviving, some not. But there was no talk of "not participating" in the recession. There was no thought of how to thrive instead of just survive. I hated every second of it. That has never been my way of thinking.

When my current employer contacted me, we sat down for lunch, his timing was terrible from a financial point of view. He was offering much less in the short term than where I was, and that was still much less than I was used to, or needed. However, I accepted immediately because it was the first time I had heard someone with a dream, a passion, and a plan in years. I had been telling everyone that there was a historic opportunity available to someone who had the vision and willingness to take the risk. His dream was that very opportunity I had been speaking of for three years. Now once again I can say without hesitation that I am chasing my Dream, and not working my business.

There is nothing more exciting than spending every day seeking those who get excited about getting better, chasing their own visions, being part of a bonfire of passion, and helping them lay out plans to achieve this. This is now my daily world, I can truly say I never work but chase my dream of helping other chase theirs!

Find yours, find like minded people, build a fire of passion in your life and chase that Dream. If you are in a place where dreams have died around you, start looking for an escape. You can do it, you can live the dream.