Think Big. Start Small.

Eric Decker
Jul 21, 2017 · 3 min read

In life, we can only get to the places we will to walk to.

Wait a second, Eric! I learned how to ride a bike when I turned four and I got a car on my eighteenth birthday. I’ve gone plenty of places I would never walk to.

Well said. I wish I could jump in my ’09 Civic, plug my life plan into the GPS and follow the dulcet tones of Google’s turn-by-turn, and arrive six minutes ahead of schedule at the doorstep of my dreams! You do, too. Life doesn’t work that way, unfortunately. Fortunately? I don’t know.

Let me try that again.

I for one, find that picture Cassie Matias took stunning and captivating. It looks like she took it from a moving vehicle; this may support my argument a little less than I thought, but here goes.

As a young man in middle school I used my mother’s camera. At first it was the way light bent through the lens into the viewfinder that drew me in. I soon realized how it worked with the mirrors and penta-prism and all. I eventually saw that one could control parameters on the camera and affect the photos that they took. Playing around I took the first picture of my own that excited me. I eventually had the chance to take photography as a class in high school and college and knew quite a few professional photographers doing weddings, sports, portraiture. Let’s skip the boring parts and get to the part where I…

Never took another step towards photography.

I have no shame about this. I decided to pursue other paths. Paths that have led me to here. By here I mean driving with Uber. I don’t know Cassie yet, she seems like an interesting person, but I would bet that somewhere along the line she thought, ‘I could drive for Uber.’ Apparently she thought better of it.

That cousin, who used to bring the life to the family get together’s, who you looked up to. The one who disappeared for years and no one knew what happened to him until he returned from rehab? He walked to places in the dark that you wouldn’t walk in broad daylight.

Take a good look at yourself. Look at where you live, where you work, who you spend time with, how you treat yourself, how you let others treat you. These are all indicators of where you have had the will to go.

Now how does that feel?

Looking back you didn’t go from high school to where you stand now in a day, a week or (unless you graduated last year) even a year! So don’t expect to get to where you want to see yourself in seven years today! Dream big dreams, make them tangible to you, allow yourself to go there, and start with baby steps!

The journey of a lifetime begins with a single step.

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