Dream Year: Make the Leap from a Job You Hate to a Life You Love by Ben Arment

Without frustration, you’d never even recognize your dream, let alone have the courage to pursue it. Going after a dream is hard. And frustration is the fuel that propels you through the challenges when your idealism runs out. There are going to be times when you’ll need that frustration. You’ll need a “worse time” to help you get through the difficult times ahead. Frustration is the grit that motivates you to pursue your vision. It makes you unwilling to go back to the way things were before you decided to act.

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

—STEPHEN KING

Most of us have jobs because someone constructed a financial model that utilizes our skills for their own gain and pays us just enough money to make employing us worthwhile to them. Someone else gets to be the boss. Someone else gets to determine our pay raises and work hours. Someone else gets to create the work culture and call the shots.

I’m here to tell you that nothing is stopping you from constructing your own system to sustain your livelihood. You can create a model that offers value to other people in exchange for money. You don’t have to depend on other people’s dreams. You can bring your own dream to life. The work isn’t easy. You’ll be stretched beyond what you think you can handle. But there is nothing more satisfying than getting paid to pursue your own dream.

Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.

—ALAN KEIGHTLEY

In their book The Start-up of You, Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha argue that we can no longer expect to find a job, but rather we must make our own jobs.

You are the product of the voices in your life. And it’s up to you to decide who to listen to.

You’re a good horse. Surround yourself with people who believe in you. If you’ve got naysayers in your life, ditch the stall they put you in and find another jockey.

The best way to get your project launched is for you to launch your project.

Make no mistake about it—your dream is not safe.

But what is safety? Your so-called safety rests in the hands of a volatile stock market, a moody boss, a fickle economy, the latest real estate appraisal, and stable health. You have no control over any of it. The safety you imagine for yourself is merely a matter of perception.

By acting as if I was not afraid, I gradually ceased to be afraid.

—THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Look, if it becomes as bad as you’d feared you can always get another job. You can recover your life savings. You can get your dignity back. But you can never recover what you never tried at all.

Reading through this list, you might think John Fairfax was a superhero, a legend, or a cartoon character. But he was simply a man who refused to let his life be tamed by the cubicle. He didn’t base his decisions on a paycheck, the fears that haunted him, or the expectations of people around him. He saw the world as an adventure, something to be exhausted, and he lived it to the fullest. He was the original “most interesting man in the world.”

The two most important days in life are the day you are born and the day you discover the reason why.

—MARK TWAIN

Jobs aren’t designed to bring your dreams to life. They’re designed to bring other people’s dreams to life—those of the founder, the owner, the CEO, or the boss. The point of Dream Year is to bring your dream to life.

The trouble is you’ve been trained for a job your whole life. You’ve been conditioned to believe that your personal value is based on what you can do for someone else. No one ever asks you what you can bring to the world but whether you can fill a position.

Stop trying to fit into someone else’s mold.

Carl Bass majored in mathematics in college and spent his early career working as a software engineer, all while pursuing his great love for craftsmanship in his own woodworking shop at home. Now, as the CEO of Autodesk, he has the perfect history for leading a company that specializes in 3D design, engineering, and builder-based design software such as AutoCAD, SketchBook, and Pixlr. It’s the culmination of all of his talents and passions.

Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.

—LES BROWN

There is no experience, no broken relationship, no childhood memory, no horrible job, and no tragedy that is wasted on you. It all culminates in one beautiful composition of experience, motivation, and purpose. This is the way great dreams are born into the world.

You can view the bad things in your life as either tragedy or trajectory. It all leads to something magnificent.

What if heartbreak and setback were qualifications for your dream? What if your dream required thick skin and you didn’t have it? Would you be okay with facing heartache after heartache if it helped prepare you?

What if before you could be used greatly, you had to be wounded deeply? Would you be willing to exchange pain for greatness?

Every experience you have either steers you away from the wrong dream or contributes to the real one. When you have this understanding, you can face the death of your artificial dreams with a sense of anticipation for what’s to come. Your life is being equipped with exactly the kind of experiences your true dream requires.

THESE THINGS WEREN’T MYSTERIES ANYMORE

When Steve Jobs was in elementary school, his next-door neighbor, an engineer at Hewlett-Packard, introduced him to Heathkits, which were electronic do-it-yourself kits. He started building radios, amplifiers, and battery testers in his own garage.

He said, “These things were not mysteries anymore.”

Uncovering the mystery of electronics is what gave Steve the insight to create a revolutionary computer company.

Steve said, “The kits gave a tremendous level of self-confidence that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things.”

Mystery paralyzes us. It makes us feel like we can only do what we know. This is why tinkering is so important. Experimentation is the antidote to mystery.

Our dreams consist of mechanical activities that wouldn’t impress anyone. How books get written, how films get made, how businesses get started—the necessary work is much less impressive than the final result.

There is a dream conspiracy at work. What we think took enormous amounts of unattainable talent actually came from hard work.

I fear not the man who practiced ten thousand kicks one time, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick ten thousand times.

—BRUCE LEE

Unless you steal time from something in your life right now, you will never achieve your dream.

As Oprah Winfrey said, “You get in life what you have the courage to ask for.”

Here’s an important lesson.

Never say no for other people.

That’s their job.

In the pursuit of your dream, everyone has a job. Your job is to dream audaciously, act courageously, and make big asks. Their job is to say yes or no. And this is their job and their job alone.

We have got to be people who are at ease with rejection. There is a “yes” waiting for us out there, and the only way to find it is by sifting through all of the “nos.”

Unfortunately, we can’t develop thick skin by resolving to have it. We get it by being rejected over and over again. Eventually, it stops fazing us.

Our tendency is to pick a favorite early on and stick with it through the entire process. But fight the temptation. The brand consultancy Interbrand came up with more than a thousand names for Microsoft’s search engine before settling on “Bing.”

Wired cofounder Kevin Kelly advocates a principle called “1,000 True Fans.” He says that anyone who produces works of art needs to accumulate only one thousand true fans in order to earn a living. This goes for artists as well as entrepreneurs, advocates, and authors. All you need is an offering for $50, $100, or more each year, and you can sustain a livelihood with one thousand customers.

Eighty percent of all choices are based on fear. Most people don't choose what they want; they choose what they think is safe. Phil McGraw

It's so much easier to tell people what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear. Phil McGraw

I don't substitute anybody else's judgment for my own. Phil McGraw

Sometimes you just got to give yourself what you wish someone else would give you. Phil McGraw

A lot of people do have tragic childhoods. But you know what? Get over it. Phil McGraw

People only take notice of you when you’re the best in the world at something and then offer value to them on a repeated basis over time.

The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn.

—JAMES ALLEN

Watch how your target audience spends its time and adjust your marketing efforts to meet them there.

I refuse to recognize that there are impossibilities. I cannot discover that anyone knows enough about anything on this earth definitely to say what is and what is not possible.

—HENRY FORD

How can you improve your own model before your competitors do? On an episode of the TV series Shark Tank, entrepreneur Mark Cuban said, “I ask myself, ‘If I was going to kick my own ass, what would I do?’” This is your challenge—to figure out how you would beat yourself at your own game and then go and do that. Starting your own business isn’t a place where you arrive and stay comfortable. It’s a continual process of innovation, experimentation, and change.

You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.

—ANNE LAMOTT

There's nothing wrong with a paycheck, unless it interferes with your ability to earn what you're worth. It usually does.

--T. HARV EKER

If it's important to you, you'll find a way. If it's not, you'll find an excuse.

-- JIM ROHN

You'll need multiple income streams to make the most of your dream and guard against the downfall of a single source.

If people knew how hard I worked to gain my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful.

--MICHELANGELO

When they tell me I'm too old to do something, I attempt it immediately.

--PABLO PICASSO

You can make the money back. You can get back on your feet. And you can try again. But you can never recover from what you didn't try at all.

Mahatma Gandhi once said:" First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."