I wait for the waiter to come back with my food from a James Beard award winning chef at a 5-star hotel in the heart of Miami. I'm staring at my beautiful wife as she enjoys the bread that just melted in our mouths. We're dressed up, overlooking the ocean at night, the palm trees swaying, the restaurant still quiet as more people start to fill in the Thursday before Christmas. Seeing the menu, I already know the dinner is going to cost more than what my rent used to be starting out after college. Fortunately, thanks to how hard we've worked, I'm not worried, I just dropped more on a valet than I used to spend on a dinner for two.
All week, I'd been driving around a $100k car around the boujeest parts of Miami and Fort Lauderdale where the car turned heads, onlookers shouted "beautiful car", people took pictures while we were at stoplights, yet I was more uncomfortable by the half million dollar exotic cars pulling up next to me, and I was the one taking pictures now. The car we were driving wasn't mine obviously, but that feeling of driving it, the smooth acceleration, the comfortable leather sheets, the sleek ambient lighting and screen design...felt like a dream.
I'd been working out in a penthouse gym with panoramic ocean and city views, experienced NBA courtside for the first time and met one of the NBA's greatest coaches and had a great but short conversation with a legend. T and I enjoyed the sun of beaches right next to $30million homes with private yacht access right on their private street canal.
"How did we get here?" is all I can think to myself as we enjoyed a dinner.
It all feels like a dream, but it isn't. That moment on my 30th birthday and that week was all foreseen in my mind YEARS ago... when I was dead broke, had $8 to my name at one point, drove a beat up car with no AC, no family or friends supported me, I lost my $30k/year job the moment I graduated from college leaving me to a training job making $700/month...
While building a network marketing business on top of a full-time sales job, putting 20,000 miles on my car/year, traveling to Chicago and Madison on weeknights every single week trying to build our team and our dream, most nights crying (because I wanted it THAT bad) on the way back with T sleeping in the car next to me as it would just be another night we'd get back at 1am before needing to go to work at 7am the next morning...with almost no financial results to show for it, we were going backwards financially, and had so much debt in our young 20s trying just to make it and build a life for ourselves...
That moment at dinner felt bittersweet yet humility engulfed me quickly after that dinner. Walking around the hotel, seeing the exotic cars, the people dressed up in $1,000 dresses and suits, time for more uncomfort, my brain already being stretched to the next level of possibilities. It was a moment and night to celebrate, but it was already time to move forward, the journey had only begun.
When you feel like you've "made it" to certain levels of success, this type of uncomfortable dreaming keeps you humble yet motivated at the same time. You can't afford a big head about any present or past success because there's always bigger fish, there are always bigger dreams to experience.
That's what happens when you CONTINUALLY test drive and scale your dreams. They keep getting bigger, more uncomfortable, and the change you must endure to become that person to have those things seems even greater. This is when character MUST take over, to keep climbing, to understand that we're only 4 steps into the shoreline and we still have the entire Atlantic Ocean ahead of us.
I think the biggest thing that holds people back in dreaming is that if they can’t have the biggest dream, they go home. This is where the go big or go home mentality hurts most.
Dreams are something that can be scaled, molded, polished, rejuvenated, reformed…you get the point. See my latest post on the dream escalator analogy for more.
Dreams change like water. The perspective holding the dream, or the thing holding the water, shapes it’s nature, how it flows, the force it can be.
When you change your perspective, the things you look at change. The higher you climb in your dreams and goals, the clearer seemingly tall and blurry objects in your life become.
You don’t have to share my dreams. Pick your own dreams and learn how to SCALE them. It will help you accelerate along the path you've always hoped for. Even if you don't achieve all your dreams (because we sure haven't and had hoped to do many of these things sooner in life), it's the PURSUIT of a worthwhile dream and goal that will give you the most hope and happiness in life that you'll ever experience.
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