Be ridiculously optimistic about your future. Not cautiously hopeful. Not carefully realistic. Ridiculously, unapologetically optimistic.
Everything that is in front of you, all the wonderful things that are coming your way, none of it is guaranteed to the person who plays it safe and dreams small. It belongs to the person who decided, somewhere along the way, that this one life was worth going all in on.
You have got one life to become everything you have ever dreamed about. One shot. Not a rehearsal. Not a warm up. This is it. And the tragedy for so many people is that somewhere along the way they learned to settle. The dream got smaller. The ambition got quieter. The fire that used to be obvious started to dim under the weight of other people’s opinions and the slow accumulation of playing it safe.
Do not be like them.
Be delusional in your dreams. Go after things that seem impossible. Go after them especially when the people around you think you have lost your mind. The ones who tell you that you cannot have what you want have already made their peace with not having what they want. That is their story. It does not have to be yours.
Do not let them steal your dream. Not the skeptics, not the practical voices, not even the version of yourself that has been conditioned to believe that wanting too much is dangerous. Under no circumstances do you hand your dream over to someone who was never willing to go after their own.
And if you are not ready to go after it today, do not give it up. Defer it. Keep it alive. A deferred dream is still a dream. A surrendered one is just a regret.
Be scared. Go anyway. Being scared means you are actually living. It means the thing you are reaching for matters enough to terrify you, and that is exactly the kind of thing worth reaching for. The people who never feel fear are not the brave ones. They are the ones who stopped wanting anything big enough to be afraid of.
Dream bigger. Reach for the moon and the stars. The higher you aim the farther you will go even when you fall short of the highest point. Aim small and you guarantee a small result. Aim enormous and even your misses land somewhere worth being.
Try everything on offer. Be alive inside and outside. Be excited about your own future in a way that people around you can actually feel. That energy is not arrogance. It is aliveness. And aliveness is contagious.
Do not look back in anger at what you could have done. Do not arrive at old and gray with a long list of things you almost went for. The regret of inaction is always heavier than the regret of trying and falling short. Always.
This is your one fantastic life. Go for it.
Russ Kyle