The Slope

It doesn’t matter how bad you want it.

It doesn’t matter that you want it as bad as you can breathe.

It doesn’t matter that you’d do anything to have it, to ‘make’ it.

No amount of willing will make your dreams come true — all that matters is every day you put in the time and you put in the effort to succeed.

Because your dream is like a mountain with slopes and crests and edges, and if you don’t keep on climbing you’ll never get to the top.

You’ll never make it without those steps. That’s a guarantee.

Why Do You Deserve to Have It?

You do have to want it more than you can breathe, but you also have to give it the space to breathe on its own. Because without that space, your dreams will suffocate and slowly wither away until there’s nothing left but the promise of what could’ve been.

Without that space they need to grow they may never come to light.

Without that space, you threaten to destroy the potential that could’ve been realized if you’d only stuck with it for one more day.

And even if they do come true, will you really be any different after achieving them? Will life suddenly become better just because somebody is paying you for what you want to do, and you’re now able to do more of that thing you love?

The truth is I put way too much pressure on myself to “make it” that I ended up not making it anywhere at all.

I tried to put a deadline on my dreams, that when I didn’t get to the point where I wanted to be I got stressed. I burnt myself out. The fire that ignited me before now drove me to procrastinate, to put off writing, to throw it all away.

I didn’t even want to look at my words anymore. They were awful, they were terrible — just looking at them made me sick. I felt like a failure, a no-good fraud. How would I ever inspire anyone to follow their dreams the same way that someone like Jon Morrow inspired me to pursue my writing dream?

You Need to be Okay with ‘Not-Moving’

Perhaps there’s the secret. Jon Westenberg recently talked about how his desire to ‘make it’ left him feeling empty inside when he’d finally made it by any clear definition of the word. He was famous now because he’d signed a record label. Even now, tons of people read his posts and it must feel validating to him.

But I bet I wouldn’t be too far off by saying that he still feels a bit empty inside. That every day when he sits down to write, he still feels like a bit of a fraud even though he’s ‘made it’. And like he says, we don’t make our dreams — they make us. And I think that’s a step in the right direction.

It’s okay to want something so bad it melts your face just thinking about it. It’s actually great, it’s perfectly normal — it means you’re human and alive. You want something, a dream, and it’s grabbed a hold of you and won’t let go so you relentlessly pursue it.

I mean, what’s the alternative? To ignore it and feel dead inside, feel empty because you’ve pushed away your passion for nobody else to see? I don’t accept that reality. No, moving towards our dreams is all we can do.

Because if you work hard enough and persist enough, your dreams will come to you when you’re ready for them.

And not a moment before.

Do Any of us Ever ‘Make It”?

We’re all just struggling towards the goals we want to make. We want to be famous, we want to be read, we want to be noticed and even validated by others. All the writers I know are like this, and it’s only human to want to be recognized. It makes us feel good, it makes us feel appreciated, it makes us feel wanted and loved and adored.

It’s not much different from pursuing a spouse, then. Because it fills a void in our heart where we’re missing something, that spark of what we call ‘love’ and that hole which we fill with outer appreciation.

I don’t have all the answers… but what I do know is this:

We all have a dream that’s grabbed a hold of us, and life is too short not to work towards your vision of success.

So you have two options:

You can either give it all you got and embrace the blood, sweat, and tears and accept the results as they are. Or you can look up the slope and realize how much you still have to climb, and get disheartened and give up.

Acceptance or refusal. Surrender or denial. Those are the only choices we really have when it comes down to the end of the line.

So What Will You Do?

Will you abandon your progress for a safer cause, and give up because there’s just too much work to do? Or will you keep going, despite the hardships and the adversity and the eternal struggle of the climb?

The slope will never go away. It’s just a fact of life. So you can either embrace it, or shrug it off and go do something else that’s easier.

But if you’re willing to put in the work, to keep on climbing despite all the people telling you not to and the overwhelming reasons to just stop, you might just make something out of this thing called life. People like Jeff Goins, Seth Godin, John Lee Dumas, Jon Morrow, and Gary Vaynerchuk make the climb every day. They stumble, they fail, they constantly lose… but still they persist. Because they’ve realized that climbing is all they can do.

Just don’t put a timeline on it.

You don’t need that kind of pressure to perform by “X amount of time”. Just keep climbing, and keep moving forward.

Harriet Beecher Stowe once said, “Never give up, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.”

What happens to us is the tide threatens to wash us away and distract us from the climb with mundane worries. If we don’t hold onto the mountain for dear life, then, we’ll only be doomed to a quiet life in a box — and if we let it, life will rip us away from the climb and persuade us to abandon the slope for safer pastures and a solid grip on land.

But you can’t let it, no matter what.

Because in the end, the climb is all there is. And if we forsake that, what is left for us to aspire to?