31 Days 2 Get You Started! January 22: Use your Imagination!
I have, as you’ve probably discerned, a very active imagination. As an only child growing up, I had not one but two imaginary friends. My mother took it all in stride. (She was probably just thrilled that there were other people to receive all of my bossiness energy.) I still have a hyper-active imagination, which is both good and bad. It’s bad, when it’s 2am and I’m afraid to close my eyes because I just watched a horror film, and I’m sure that some entity is under my bed, waiting to get me. It’s great, however, when it allows me to imagine how far this business can go, and create a rational strategy to take it there.
Imagination is everything. If I wasn’t imaginative, at my lowest, around 2008, I would have assumed that I was stuck, that my best years were far behind me, and right now, I’d be just another self-loathing, depressed lawyer, whining and boring my therapist. I’d be another person making excuses and blaming everyone else for my inability to commit. But because of my imaginative abilities, in 2008, I was able to see a different way to live. I had no concrete idea how I was going to make that happen, but I knew that it couldn’t be worse than document review.
Your ability to imagine the opportunities you want is everything. I see people on Facebook, for example, cursing their jobs, their lives, but crucially, without the imagination to believe that they could, and should, do much better. They decide that they’re stuck and having decided that, they are. If they had the imagination to really envision their ideal job, they could get started, step by step.
How many celebrity interviews, for example, have you read, in which some celeb says, “I always imagined myself…?” The reason these people are famous is because they had the courage/desperation/determination/insanity to commit to their imagination. Sure, many of them had some lucky breaks. But without their imagination, they wouldn’t have bothered to chase those lucky breaks because they would have thought,”…well, how could I ever be famous?”
Commit to your imagination, and realize that you already have all the tools necessary to start creating a life you love. Imagine that.