Your Hunger Will Fade – Five Ways To Keep Your Dreams Alive

“The starting point of all achievement is desire.”
– Napoleon Hill

What food do you crave?  Imagine a delicious candy bar, moist brownies, juicy steak, freshly baked bread, or perhaps fresh fruits and vegetables – whatever you like.  You long for it.  You are tempted by it.

You hunger for it.

Depending on how hungry you are, you may long for it for a few seconds, a few minutes or even hours.

At some point though, if you don’t get it, your hunger will fade.

You lose that desire.  You will carry on with your life as it always was, and forget about the cake, steak, fruits or vegetables.

And So It Is With Our Dreams

Do you ever put off your dreams? Perhaps for a “someday”?  Do you tell yourself this isn’t the right moment, or thought to yourself that this opportunity will come again.

We tell ourselves in a few days, weeks,   months, or years we’ll stop putting our lives on hold and really start living.  We tell ourselves everything will be better: we’ll still be the same, only more free to do what we want.

Except we won’t be.

“What is not started today is never finished tomorrow.”
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If you’ve got a burning desire to do something right now, you need to know that in time, left unfulfilled and unnourished, that hunger, desire, that passion will fade.

Because paradoxically, if you don’t act on your dreams, if you don’t feed your desires – you’ll starve that internal hunger.

So if you want to stay hungry, you’ve got to fight to keep your dreams alive.

Five Ways You Can Fight To Keep Your Dreams Alive

  • Write Your Dream Down – And Read It Daily. It’s no surprise that if you sign up for my free personal development training course, we dig into this right away. I literally read my life purpose daily – out loud. In addition, I sit on my balcony and take a break for at least 10 minutes every day – a luxury I know not everyone has – and think about my life purpose, my dreams, and my passions.
  • Just Spend Five Minutes A Day On It.  One sinister trap we fall into with our dreams is envisioning them as these big all or nothing pursuits. We think to ourselves that there’s not enough time in the day, and anything worth doing is doing right. I agree – but if you don’t give yourself a taste of what it’s like, you’ll lose that hunger. Commit to small actions daily, and you’ll find yourself pushing harder to make time for your dreams. Which leads me into…
  • Give Something Else Up So You Can Spend Time On It.  I’ve talked about dropping commitments before, and I am going to let you in on a powerful secret. The secret is this: when you want to work on your dreams, and you say “I wish I could, but I really have to _____”, those magic words have just revealed to you where you can make time for your dreams.  Of course, if you don’t know what is eating up your time, you know the two solutions: the time log and the time budget.
  • Have Your Friends Support You And Keep You Accountable.  It’s sometimes challenging to keep yourself motivated when you’re the only one responsible for your dreams.  I have some great friends who I regularly get together with, review my progress with in mastermind calls or talk with via email.  Their advice helps move me forward, while their encouragement helps me keep my dreams alive.
  • Visualize Yourself Living It.  I like visualizing my dreams. It sounds so much more productive than saying “I sit around in my pajamas and daydream.” I admit it – there are times where I just relax and daydream. In addition to that, I try to visualize not just the end state (which I am not sure is discernible from my daydreaming!), but also visualize the steps I take to get there. I also imagine how that moment feels, my thoughts, my personality – and that slowly changes me. For example, I’ve become much more assertive over the years, and I attribute that at least in part to visualizing myself as a confident, assertive person.

Are You Still Hungry?

“Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”
– Steve Jobs

How about you?  How do you keep your dreams, your desires and the hunger alive?

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