anywhere by just reading this book, so now's the time to take action. For the next four days, spend at least 10 minutes a day writing down one or more big ideas that you'd like to accomplish in your lifetime. For each day, make your ideas bigger and more outlandish than the previous day's ideas. This will force you to keep expanding your mind on what's possible so you don't limit yourself unnecessarily.
On the fifth day, rearrange your ideas from the one you like the most to the one you like the least. Don't judge your ideas by how much you think you can achieve them. Judge your ideas by how much you really want them. If your ideas don't scare or embarrass you by their audacity, you're not dreaming big enough.
On the sixth day, look over your ideas and ask yourself what type of training and skills you'd need to achieve each dream. Then ask yourself if you'd be willing to take the time and effort needed to achieve that dream.
For example, many people dream about becoming a movie star. Now ask yourself, would you be willing to take the time to take acting classes and practice acting in your spare time, even if you never made any money at it? Would you be willing to go to countless auditions and face rejection at nearly all of them?
If you're not willing to do something for free for the rest of your life, that means you don't really want to do the work needed to achieve that dream. If you won't do the necessary work for free, you're only looking at the benefits and not the activity. That means you really don't want that dream after all.
Finally on the seventh day, find the one idea that you can't live without. If you can live without a particular idea, then it's just a pleasant fantasy. If you know in your heart that you can't live without a dream, then that's the one dream that you need to pursue the most.
Make sure the dream you pick is one that you want, not something your parents, friends, or relatives want for you. This is your life so you must decide what you truly want, not what you think you should do. It's easy to have a dream but it's much harder to find your passion.
Passion is what you're willing to do for free because you enjoy that particular activity.
Passion is what makes you happy.
Ultimately, passion is what makes life worth living.
Drain a life of passion and you really have no life at all. Tragically, people can go through their whole lives without ever finding their passion. Without passion, it's too easy to get distracted by superficial pleasures like drugs, sex, and alcohol that ultimately never brings lasting happiness. With passion, your life will have purpose, direction, and above all, a sense of meaning.
Ultimately, happiness comes from pursuing your passion. Until you find what you're passionate about, lasting happiness will likely elude you, creating a life of frustration and boredom. However, once you discover your life's passion, you can feel more in control of your world because you'll know what you want and have the courage to go out and get it no matter what obstacles may get in your way.
Passion is the spark of life. Finding what you are passionate about can change your life overnight.
Debbi Fields was only 20 years old when she started selling homemade chocolate cookies. She turned her love for cookies into a multimillion-dollar business as founder of Mrs. Fields Cookies.
Nick Woodman loved surfing, and while surfing along the coast of Australia, he got the idea to develop straps that could hold a camera that could record a surfer's best moments on the waves. Eventually, he decided to create his own wearable camera, and this turned into the GoPro camera that developed into a million-dollar business.
Walt Disney enjoyed drawing and created various animated characters with different animation companies. Although these early characters and animation companies failed, Walt Disney eventually succeeded when he created Mickey Mouse.
At age 15, Greta Thunberg started protesting outside the Swedish parliament to take action on climate change. Her action inspired other students to organize similar strikes for the climate. After addressing the United Nations Climate Change Conference, Greta soon became a popular environmental activist known throughout the planet.
These people aren't successful because they made a lot of money or became famous. They're successful because they pursued their passion, and their passion helped them overcome any fears, doubts, and obstacles in their way. How happy and successful would Debbi Fields be if she had tried to start an animation company while Walt Disney tried to bake cookies?
For every Debbi Fields or Walt Disney, there are thousands of people happily pursuing their passion in all walks of life all over the world. You may have never heard of these people but you can recognize them because they've chosen a life they enjoy every second of the day.
Everyone has a different passion, so the only person who can discover what your passion might be is you.
Take the time now to decide what you're most passionate about. If you don't know, stop reading right now. Then spend however much time you need to find your passion, because if you don't find it now, it will be too easy to let inertia take over so you drift through life with no purpose, direction, or meaning whatsoever. Finding your passion literally defines your life.
The huge difference between passion and fantasy is that fantasy focuses solely on a goal (and all its benefits), while passion focuses on both a goal and the activity needed to achieve that goal.
MONEY WILL NEVER MAKE YOU HAPPY
Perhaps the biggest myth that too many people believe is that money will make them happy. Yet they never define how much money would make them happy. If you had a dollar more, would you be happy? A thousand dollars more? A million? Ten million?
I guarantee that whatever amount of money you think will make you happy will never be enough because money alone can never make you happy. People think money will make them happy, but evidence consistently shows how wrong that can be.
Many people play the lottery because they fantasize about winning a fortune. Yet the list of multimillion-dollar lottery winners who consistently fail to find happiness is horrifying.
In 2002, construction company owner John Whittaker won $315 million in the Powerball lottery. Yet within five years, he had spent all his money. Even worse, his granddaughter developed a drug habit and died. When asked about his lottery winnings, Whittaker and his wife said if they could go back in time, they'd tear up that lottery ticket.
Evelyn Basehore won $3.9 million playing New Jersey's lottery. Incredibly, she kept playing the lottery and won another $1.4 million. Yet all that money went to relatives and poor investment choices. Then she gambled away the rest of the money in Atlantic City casinos, leaving her broke and forced to live in a trailer park, where she had to work two jobs just to pay her bills.
Abraham Shakespeare won $30 million and suddenly found himself hounded by people who wanted a share of his fortune. Before Shakespeare got murdered by his girlfriend, he told his few remaining friends, “I'd have been better off broke. I thought all these people were my friends, but then I realized all they want is just money.”
Still think money can buy happiness?
People want money because they think more money represents freedom. Money does give you more opportunities, but that also means more opportunities to screw up. When people say they want more money, what they're really saying is that they want more material possessions.
Just watch professional athletes who sign multimillion-dollar contracts and rush out to buy three sports cars, two
