Tag Archives: Dreams

Are Perks Enough?

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I’ve been traveling the later part of this week and today I was able to get my work done before noon and since a lot of our offices are in places there are ski resorts, I decided to head up to Kickinghorse Ski Resort.  Now if you’ve never skied a weekday, you are missing out! There was practically nobody on the hill today and as I completed a run I could head right up the lift again without any waiting.  Now that is the way to ski!  I was able to cut fresh powder tracks ALL day long, drop into chutes and that’s something that rarely happens on a weekend as the resorts balloon up with thousands of skiers and it’s harder to get into the good spots.

As I was skiing today I got to reflecting on the perks of my job and jobs in general, are they enough to keep someone at a job?  For some maybe, but not for me.  While I get the ability to take time off for OT worked and go skiing during the day it’s definitely not enough for me.  I want the ability to go skiing during the week for a full week and stay in a beautiful lodge right on the mountain.  I want the ability to bring my kids and wife with me and make a great family trip out of it.  Some may say well why don’t you just take holidays.  Yeah that three weeks that I have to ASK to get off, yeah that doesn’t cut it either.  North American’s are one of the hardest worked people on this planet and we don’t get nearly compensated enough for the amount we work.  (I was able to find this pretty cool graphic of what countries work. Here is another one for 2004)

We have the ability though this pretty amazing opportunity to reach those goals of getting more time and money so that we can for example ski during the weekday.  For us, we are utilizing this opportunity so that we can create our own perks and not some forced on us perks that really are there to just keep us at our job.  I’m looking forward to getting out of my job and semi-retiring so that I can spend the better part of the days with my family.  Now this may not be everyone’s dream and that’s fine figure out what it is you want to achieve.

Anyway as nice as it was to ski in the middle of the day, those kinds of perks are not good enough, we need to create our own!

Stay tuned for a video blog entry tomorrow. I can’t upload due to the slow internet connection in my hotel room

Fighting for Dreams

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John Maxwell couldn’t have said it any better in his latest blog entry “Fight for your dreams in 2011”.

Who in your life is stealing your dreams?  Maybe it’s time you get around people who do dream, who do set goals and get away from the people that are continually dragging you down because they have lost their own dreams.

http://johnmaxwellonleadership.com/2011/01/03/fight-for-your-dreams-in-2011/

You Need to Start!

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This morning I read a great blog entry by John Maxwell on Starting: The Great Separator and I thought back to all aspects of my life and just how true his words were.  This article can apply to any aspect in your life where you are trying to achieve a goal, dream, activity, vision, pretty much anything in your life. 

There were 5 main points in this article:

  1. Start with Yourself
  2. Start Early
  3. Start Small
  4. Start with The End in View
  5. Start Now

The two main things I got from this article however were start small and start with the end in view.  Starting small is probably the biggest thing I’ve always struggled with in my life because I’ve always taken on more then I can chew on many occasions and because of that failed.  However what sets successful people apart are the ones who get back up and keep trying and making changes along the way to reach that end goal.  It’s like what Albert Einstein says “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.  So start small, start with something manageable so that you can at least get going.  Its better to start with something little than nothing at all, at least your doing something and working towards momentum.

Start with the end in view is also huge because if you don’t know what your working towards then why are you working?  Get a passion, find a vision so that you can work towards it bit by bit.  Don’t get me wrong your passion and vision don’t need to be some grand scale larger than life goals, they can be small, they can be whatever you want them to be.  Just make sure you have that in view and go out and achieve it.

This blog post is a perfect way to start this week off, I hope it uplifts and inspires you as well.

http://johnmaxwellonleadership.com/

Dream Building

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This afternoon I spent some time on the internet dream building on various things we plan to achieve in our lifetime, things we plan on doing for our parents, and things we plan on doing for others.  I find sometimes we get so caught up in our day to day that we forget the little things like spending some time to dream build.  I’ve blogged on this a few times however it’s always good to bring it up once in awhile.

So do you dream build?  Do you have pictures up about whatever it is your dreaming about?  Have you set goals for when your going to achieve them?  Do you believe you’ll achieve them?  You NEED to keep whatever it is you want to achieve at the forefront of your mind, if you don’t, it just gets lost in the day to day and sooner or later you’ll wake up 5-10-15 years down the road and go, what the heck was that?  Where did the time go? Why am I stuck with the same dreams and goals I set out before but never moved ahead in achieving them.

I know we’ve impacted a few people that read this blog and are not in our business or in this business and that’s awesome.  I wish all of you who read this blog great success in whatever it is you have set out for your goals. 

Dream

Determination

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Recently Ed Stafford completed the unimaginable trek along the Amazon river from source to sea.  He started April 2nd, 2008 and completed a few weeks ago on August 9th, 2010.  The distance?  Oh just a few miles, try 4,000 to be exact (That’s 6,437 KM’s)  To put that into perspective that’s the same distance as walking from Vancouver to Halifax which if you change the directions on Google maps from driving to walking is about 45 days.  Ed’s trip was 859 days through dense forest where he encountered biting insects, snakes, bogs (not blogs), jaguars, pit vipers, deadly electric eels and tribes thinking he was some gringo looking to prospect land for oil.

This is on determined man because his partner who was supposed to do the whole thing with him left after 3 months.  He was later joined by another man from Peru who said he would guide him for 5 days however ended up taking him all the way to the end.  The sheer will to complete something of this task, to be away from friends and family for over two years to complete this ultimate journey is just astonishing.  However it was his determination and whether that determination was fuelled by his egotistical desire to be in the record books or his goal of raising awareness and money for Cancer Research, the ME Association and Rainforest charities, it doesn’t matter.  He had a goal large enough that no matter what stood in the way, anaconda’s, tribe members that wanted to hill him, he did the near impossible and completed his journey.

I guess I can equate in some ways to Lindsay and I building our side business.  Yes the odds are stacked heavily against us and seem somewhat near impossible however we have a goal and a dream that’s larger than any obstacle and that is fuelling our desire for more out of life.  We have one life to live and we plan to live it to the fullest and that does not mean living in debt (house, car, loc, credit card, student loans, etc…) or earning enough to just get by every single week and not being able to bless our parents who have given us so much.  To me that’s not living, maybe to some but not us.

Anaconda!

The one biggest thing we have in our corner that Ed did not in his near impossible dream is that we have people backed by people backed by more people in succession without failure that have accomplished the things we want to accomplish and knock down.  It’s not some person somewhere that sorta was successful, it’s people we get coaching and mentoring from each day.  Ed did not have people he could go to and say hey how did you make it through this part or that part.  What did you do here or there?  Yes, Ed made it without guidance or help but he did end up making a lot of mistakes along the way and in some instances it almost cost him his life, ended up getting off track, and almost starving to death.  I take comfort in the fact that we can avoid those kinds of mistakes because the people who’ve gone before us can teach us not to make those same mistakes and help us become more successful and in turn any mistakes that we make we can pass the knowledge on and make sure our team are successful.

I am pretty pumped to read whatever book Ed puts out of his journey’s because the videos I’ve seen so far are pretty flippen amazing.  I’m pretty inspired by Ed and what he’s accomplished.  Why? Because he was determined and he beat the odds and did what people said he couldn’t do or thought he was crazy for trying.  He turned around and proved them all wrong.  We will prove people wrong and beat the odds, statistics and naysayers because our goals are worth every single ounce of energy and time we put into them and helping others do the same is an amazing accomplishment.

What’s the other option?  Say those goals and dreams are not worth it? Quite? Give up?

“Anyone can achieve what they want to achieve if they work hard enough”

Check out Ed’s Blog here – http://www.walkingtheamazon.com

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Please check out these other determined bloggers in the 2010 Summer Blogging Challenge. Cliff – Peer Pressure Works, Chad – The Grind, Kelly – ‘Round the Bend, Kim – In Desperate Need of Entertainment, Kyle – Teacher, Tinkerer, Farmer, Geek, Liam – In the Now, Brad – Kick Me Out Soon, Tammy – Tam I am, Erron – From The Inside Looking In, James – Feelings of White, Vlad – Analog Coast, Janine - Because