It says, "In pursuit of your dream, making money isn't to be the end-all. Wealth is not about having a lot of money. It is about having a lot of options. Imagine your legacy when you share that wealth to accomplish good in this world."
Isn't that great? I had to read it a couple times, actually, because it's quite powerful. I just want to break it down just a tiny bit.
"In the pursuit of your dream, making money isn't to be the end-all. Wealth is not about having a lot of money. It's about having a lot of options."
So when you're pursuing your dream, I don't think it should be about making money really. For me, pursuing my dream is about doing something actually meaningful. It's not about just making dollars, because all dollars do is give you options.
So when pursuing your dream, your dream shouldn't be the money itself. The actual dream, in my mind, is not so much the end destination. It's the vehicle you use to get there. Because there's a lot of different ways to get to a dream. But if the way that you're trying to get there is something that makes you miserable and you hate it, that's just really torturous.
So here's my question for you today: Is there a way to get to your future dream by starting to live your dream now?
When my husband and first had the spark of interest to go into international charity work, we were still in college, had just started our family, and barely had two dimes to rub together. But we had one of those "tuning fork moments" when hearing one of our mentors, Paul Johnston of BYU, speak to the Animal Science students about working with chicken farmers in Central and South America. It was one of those moments when you're like, "Okay, there's something about this that we need to pay attention to."
What's a tuning fork moment you ask? Let me just explain it really quick. If you take a tuning fork and you strike it against something, it starts vibrating a certain pitch. If you then draw it closer to another tuning fork, the other tuning fork that you did not strike starts ringing the exact same pitch. So the idea of a tuning fork moment is when you get close to something that is your purpose, your dream, something that just hits you in way that you say, "Wow, this is something that I want to be a part of."
We both had that feeling. We loved the idea of being able to take basic agriculture principles and go teach them in developing countries. we thought we would wait until we "had it made" and then we could go out and travel and make a difference. But life doesn't always go as smoothly as you plan, and this dream kept getting farther and farther away. So one day we decided that the time was right to start pursuing our dream as a vehicle to get to our dream. We thought to ourselves, "You know what? It's now or never."
The road was not easy. We struggled with underemployment for three years as we made the transition. We spent all of our savings and even went into some debt in pursuit of what we knew was what we were supposed to do. But we knew that it was the only way to break into the industry of international development work.
Now we've been in the industry for about 10 years and looking back we can see that pursuing our dream ended up not being about making enough money so we could stop earning a living and then pursue our dreams. It was about living our dream now as a vehicle to get to our dream. In this new field, we don't make as much money as we could in the corporate world, but we love what we're involved in, and that's what really matters. We're able to be living our dream while we're still pursuing our dream.
Someday we'd like to be traveling more together and pursuing the dream at a higher level. But in the meantime, since we need to continue providing for our family, we can still live a portion of our dream now while we're pursuing our end goals. Today we're both so grateful that we got involved in our dream right away rather than putting it off endlessly, even though that interim time was an extremely difficult trial to go through.
Listen to the last part of the quote: "Imagine your legacy when you share that wealth [or that dream] to accomplish good in this world."
That second part of the quote really stood out to me because What greater good than to be able to help people who are in extreme poverty develop their talents and learn, and be able to raise themselves out of that poverty state. It's just the most fulfilling work that I could imagine, and it's what we've chosen.
So I would just challenge you, as you're thinking about your dreams and the strategies you're gonna use to get them, think about this. Is there a way that those strategies themselves could be fulfilling your dream in part? Think about ways that you can get to your long term dream by living your dream now.
Wealth is not just about money. Wealth is about the joy and the contentment and the fulfillment you feel inside when you are doing what really fills you up. You are pursuing your tuning fork moments and having them make your life meaningful.
I would encourage you today to think about the strategies for your life, if you have felt tuning fork moments like that, just think, "Is there something I could be doing toward that just a little bit?" And figure out how you can reach your dreams and make your life better.
I hope you have a wonderful weekend!
~JS~ 🌞
#StrategySaturday
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Listen to the full podcast episode about this post here:
https://shows.pippa.io/jumbledsunshine/pursuing-your-future-dream-by-living-your-dream-now
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