Follow your dreams

What holds people back? Everyone has dreams and aspirations, but achieving them can be daunting. This seems to either get easy or harder with time depending on who you are and the experiences you have. The reality is that the core thing that holds us back is ourselves. It is our perceptions of what we can or can’t do. Sometimes if you don’t think about things, blindly go for it and just figure things out along the way, you’ll wake up one day being grateful that you did. For fun, let’s do a little story time to illustrate.?

My dream and passion growing up was to skateboard. It is all I thought about and all I wanted to do. I still remember thinking when I was 11, that I wanted to move to the neighboring city because that’s where all the good skaters lived. As I got older that got easily replaced with California. TV, movies, skateboard videos and magazines all painted a world beyond my own. It was a sun filled level of progression and community I wanted to be a part of. It is hard to explain or understand how consuming something like that can be if you aren’t a skateboarder. Yet if you are a dreamer and passionate about something you can relate. Looking back, that consumption completely blinded me to reality. I never questioned if something was possible. I never thought about the side effects of my actions. I just felt driven to do something.?

The summer I turned 19 I was put in a position to do something about it. I got it in my mind that I was going to move. Despite being a bit crazy, luckily I wasn’t stupid. I knew I needed money, so I took on 3 jobs at once for about 4 months. One was my go to: wrapping electric coils with fiberglass tape to be used in electric generators, when I would get off that job I shifted into being a janitor. I’d clean that factory then also go over to a machine shop a few miles down the road and do the same thing there. On the days off from that work I did catering jobs. It was a cycle of job to job to job to sleep. A pattern I just got into the rhythm of, until I finally felt I had made enough. Enough was relative, as the reality after that marathon effort was a little over $2000. That was a gold mine at the time. If it sheds any light on my outlook, my friends always said I could go to Pluto with a quarter and come back with a dollar.?

Having reached some imaginary financial goal in my head, I rolled up to the local library and grabbed some books on San Francisco. It is funny thinking back that it was my only resource and that I never sought any before this point. I had maybe 2 at most, dated books with barely any info in them on a city I had never seen. Also to give you context, growing up my family didn’t travel, we didn’t have money. My travel was limited to going to New Jersey occasionally in the summer to stay with my grandparents. Unfortunately the memory of each of those trips revolved around being broken down on the side of the road and my dad getting someone to let him work on the car in their shop. Luckily as I pondered my own travel, at the time that was missing from memory. I was blind, I just wanted to go. With minimal prep and not really thinking anything through, I packed everything in my little Honda Civic and decided to head west. It wasn’t like I set a date, it was completely sporadic.?

Whether it was my manifestation or some insane force pushing me, I literally drove non stop to SF not knowing anyone, not knowing where I was going to stay, not knowing the city, and obviously not thinking. To say I was unprepared would be a massive understatement. I realized how much so when I arrived. For those that don’t know, the city is basically a 7 mile island. There aren’t random parking lots, let alone parking in general. Why does this matter? I guess in the back of my mind, I thought I could just easily find a place to sleep in my car. That wasn’t an option. I started panicking. What had I done, what was I going to do. Reality finally started hitting. Then a strange thing happened, the universe stepped in. Before I had left, my good friend Merideth gave me her cousin Lisa’s phone number. I had never met or talked to her, but that day she became one of my angels. I called her number from a pay phone, her roommate answered and without hesitation told me to come over. I drove straight there, which in itself was a massive achievement. If you’ve never been to SF, it is hilly, like REALLY hilly. There are hills where if you get stuck at a light and are on the hill, you have to pull up your emergency brake, push your brake to the floor and push the gas at the same time so you don’t roll backwards. I was in my first car, which I had gotten months before the trip. It was a stick shift and I literally had just learned to drive stick. Again, it never occurred to me this was going to be a thing.

When I arrived at Lisa’s house, she and her roommate let me in. I got offered to stay for as long as I needed. In retrospect, this just floors me. Here I was someone they had never met, someone that showed up out of nowhere and they were willing to take me in. People like this are what make the world a better place. It gives me hope and reminds me that kindness changes people’s lives. It has also reminded me of who I need to be. Not wanting to intrude or take advantage of this, I set an alarm for early the next day to go hunting for a place of my own. Granted at this point I’d never gone out and gotten my own place. I didn’t even have a clue what that process was like. Regardless, I put on my best clothes which probably still had me looking half homeless and started walking the city. Back then there were tons of news stands down on Market street and as luck would have it some were filled with classifieds and apartment guides. I grabbed every one I could find, rolled back to Lisa’s and studied them like I was taking a Bar exam. After a few hours and some loose prospects, I decided to go visit all my targets. Later that day I shook hands on a month by month lease. I had arrived!

Looking back, this whole sequence of events changed my life. It changed my perception of the world, my place in it and what I could do. If I had planned or thought about it too long it may not have happened. Even if it did, it might not have happened how it did. I took a leap because I felt compelled to. Sometimes we know deep in our soul that we need to or want to do something, that we can do something. Don’t let your fears hold you back. The reality is that everything could go wrong, but if you ignore all the noise, you won’t know that you can fail. The world is full of wonder and opportunity waiting for you. You can win. If I can stumble through this life and somehow come out better on the other end, you can too. No one has it all figured out, no one has all the answers, we are all equally just out there trying. Cheers to your adventure!