A big dream come true

When Dreams Come True This past year has taught me a lot about dreams. Not the kind that you have when you’re sleeping. The kind that keep you up at night. The dreams that make your heart race and make you jump out of bed in the morning. The dreams that are pulled into reality with a big vision, a great support system and hard work. I’ve learned that those dreams can be as real as ever, just as soon as you stop dreaming and start doing. That’s the scary part. The doing. The taking of the action. The “What if I fail?” moments. It’s during this time that you start wondering if the Big Vision is a silly vision. The Great Support System starts to wonder if they are ever going to see your face again… if dinner will be on the table…if the house will be clean. The Hard Work becomes so exhausting that you are reduce to tears. But you keep going. It’s the passion that drove that dream into your heart in the first place that keeps you going even in those horrible moments of self-doubt. Rust Belt Lifestyle is one of those dreams. A concept that Tami Weingartner and I have talked about for years. Taking action and making it happen was a leap of faith for us. Our Vision is still BIG! These humble beginnings are just the start for us! The hard work will never end. We are up for the challenge. But since the launch of our inaugural issue one thing has change…our support system grew. The amount of support from friends and family and our community has been AMAZING! We are so thankful for your words of encouragement and willingness to share Rust Belt Lifestyle with everyone you know! So today I’m going to share with you a little back story about one of the styled shoots you can find in Rust Belt Lifestyle. It’s a story about a dream as well. The dream of an 11 year old. Anyone who personally knows my daughter Sophia, knows she has a personality that’s hard to come by in a small child. One of her many quirks is her obsession with Audrey Hepburn. While most young girls would twirl around in Disney Princess costumes, you would find Sophia dressed in a sleek black dress wearing pearls, or roaming about the house in a babushka singing Moon River. Now, for anyone who knows Tami Weingartner, you know she has a deep love for all things Ralph Lauren. But what most people don’t know is how these two obsessions could possibly come together. You see there’s this book. Simply called, Ralph Lauren. As it happens with most friends who spend A LOT of time together, Tami got me hooked on the book as well. We both own a copy and have spent hours upon hours studying and discussing the imagery in the book. I’ll stop here before I spin off into a tangent about all the glorious things you will find within it’s pages and suffice to say that Audrey Hepburn wrote the forward to Ralph’s book. Wedding season is a bit stressful for Sophia. I’m gone, more than I’m home. Tami has bore witness to the pitiful late night phone calls from Sophia as we drive home from weddings near midnight. Her little voice on the other end “Mommy are you almost home, I miss you.” Week after week of these sad calls were enough to spark the vision. Tami promised Sophia her very own personal Audrey Hepburn photo shoot for her birthday. In Tami’s words ” You give a nod to archives of Slim Aaron and a wink to the iconic vision & storytelling of the one and only Mr. Ralph Lauren. And you pull out all the stops to create something unique and fun.” We made it happen. We had so much fun scouring thrift stores and vintage boutiques coming up with the most perfect wardrobe to pay tribute to the iconic photos of Audrey leaving Rome in 1960. The story transitions into what Tami saw as “the modern day Audrey” wearing none other than Ralph Lauren. It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting Image courtesy of Jeff Palm of Jeff Palm Studio I finally got around to reading The Alchemist over the (Australian) summer. And by that, I mean actually ‘reading’ it! I also have the Audible version and can’t wait to listen to Jeremy Irons narrate for two hours! Although, I’ll struggle not to think of Scar from The Lion King as my narrator! I have boiled it down to seven quotes which meant the most to me as I read it, with the first one being the title to this article. ‘It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.’ What is life without dreams? Not just dreams, but dreams that have the possibility of coming true. This was the motivating factor for me to start my entrepreneurial move at 41, when a dream materialised, became possible thanks to advances in technology, and now I and my business partner are chasing that dream as hard as we can. And let me tell you, our lives haven’t been this interesting in a long time! We are loving the journey, and are extremely grateful for all the new contacts that have come into, and enhanced, our lives as a result. ‘(Everyone understands) the language of enthusiasm, of things accomplished with love and purpose, and as a part of a search for something believed in and desired’ This quote encapsulates what being an entrepreneur is all about. Starting with an idea, getting enthusiastic about what it can become, and then turning that idea into a reality because you ‘love’ it and you know it is your ‘purpose’ to achieve it. I read that getting people to join your startup company is driven by how enthusiastic YOU are about the company, and then that enthusiasm flows through the rest of the employees. Success is unable to be obtained if you aren’t truly in love with what you are doing and thus doing your work (whatever it is) enthusiastically. This is no more evident than looking at what I achieved in my corporate life vs what I am currently achieving in my own business. ‘When you want something, all the universe conspires to help you achieve it’ These thirteen words seem to sum up the whole meaning behind the book. Throughout the book, there is the message of the “Personal Legend”, whereby if you are able to find your true calling, and have the inner strength to try to chase that calling, then all the universe will conspire to help you achieve it. As I wrote in my other article, What Makes a Perfect Co-Founder? Shared Values: “Sometimes the world lays everything out in front of you, but we’re just too stupid, scared, or afraid to see it, and we miss the hints and opportunities.” It’s easy to miss the ‘clues’ that the universe gives you to help you reach your Personal Legend, especially when they appear (on the surface) to be road-blocks and wrong turns. But it is only with the wisdom of hindsight that we realise they were put there for a reason to test us, to help us to grow, and to prepare us for the bigger, better future that we are looking for. ‘When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he never dreamed of when he first made the decision.’ There is definitely no quote I have read that sums up my life better since I made the decision to leave corporate life and pursue my dream. Having been ‘brainwashed’ into a certain way of thinking and leading my life, I did not imagine all of the things that I would get involved in, be a part of, and learn about when I quit my safe job. Even more important is trusting in the process (ie. the current) such that I am learning all the time, being grateful for the experiences I am a part of, and trusting that the universe is conspiring to help me achieve my goal of launching a successful software platform designed to improve all aspects of the Retirement Living Industry. ‘If you pay attention to the present, you can improve upon it. And, if you improve on the present, what comes later will also be better.’ This quote touched me because it talks about something different from the entrepreneurial journey, but something that I am also working on improving: mindfulness. Part of accepting our life (both the good and the bad) is to pay attention to the present, and to do our best to neither dwell on past events nor worry about potential future events. It’s very easy to either look at what negatively happened in the past or project a negative future outcome, and use that as fuel for our decisions in the present. I know that we need to LEARN from the past, and use that as a guide for present decisions, but only as long as they are productive and positive decisions that will positively impact on the present. What’s great about this quote is that it is simply saying that if we focus on the present, and make decisions that will improve our present, then it will automatically improve our future. The key here, however, is not that we should make short-sighted or materialistic decisions (ie. go out and buy a new car or new clothes). These things, whilst you think they are making you feel better, will only make you feel worse in the longer run, and the future will actually be worse than the present, especially if you weren’t able to afford those things to start with. Making decisions that will genuinely (and fundamentally) positively affect your present is hard to do, especially because you might think they aren’t helping at all. However, if you trust in the process and are clear about your Personal Legend, your future will always be better as a result of your choices today. There is a strong connection between this quote and the next one below. In the book, Santiago meets a man who had a Personal Legend, but his fear of being unable to achieve it stopped him from chasing it. Africa’s First Woman President, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was quoted as saying, “The size of your dreams must always exceed your current capacity to achieve them.” The flip-side of having a dream is that often you feel that you don’t deserve to achieve the dream because it is so big. Self-doubt is the biggest limiting factor facing civilisation today, with us constantly being told we aren’t good enough. We are shown images of “perfect” celebrities leading “perfect” lives, and we all idolise them and say to ourselves: they are perfect, I will never be like them, I will never lead the perfect life. And often, if something good does come along, we destroy it with our negative innermost dominating thoughts of how we aren’t good enough, and we don’t deserve success and happiness. Thus we continue living just at that point of being ‘okay’, without ever being able to lift ourselves up to living a ‘great’ life. ‘There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.’