“It’s impossible to achieve your dream working for someone else, working on someone else’s dream,” Steven Hu.  I attended a business conference a couple of weeks ago and this was a reminder that we are capable of achieving our dreams—and that we can only achieve those dreams if we do the work to achieve those goals.  The more time we spend focusing on someone else’s dream, no matter how lucrative it may be, no matter how secure it makes us feel, the less time we have to dedicate to the things we enjoy doing or to our ultimate goals. 

The brain is amazing and can convince us that we do things for the right reason.  Like we can go an entire life doing nothing to work toward are dreams under the guise of doing the right thing for someone else.  We train ourselves to believe our dreams and goals don’t matter in the context of other people’s goals and dreams.  We convince ourselves that we have to settle for other people’s dreams because we don’t see how they can fly just because someone else is further on the runway—even if our wings are already spread.  People get confused with the idea of self-sacrifice, thinking giving up what we love hoping someone will do the same for us is somehow noble.

The bottom line is we can’t achieve what we do not work on.  We will never get what we don’t put energy toward.  It quite literally doesn’t work like that.  Energy flows where attention goes, so if we don’t give the appropriate amount of attention to our projects, the things we want to do, then how can they come to us?  And if we are working on other people’s dreams, then how can we work on our own>  And if we manage to work on our own dreams, are we giving it the same attention and care that we would give others?  Are we giving it too much, making the point about perfection?

Make sure we know what we want, how we feel about what we want, and make sure we dedicate enough time to the things that bring us joy.  It’s fine to help others and we should help others—but we should never help others at the expense of who we are and what we love.  I’ve known some people who feel they need to put themselves last in every situation in order to be worthy.  That ends when we know our worth and we have clarity on where we are going.  Believe enough to know our capacity and capabilities and our worth and then go for it all with complete faith and abandon.