As an adult I have spent much of the last 10 years or so chasing George…Washington, that is. I made decisions based solely on dollars and cents (not sense). What was in the best interest of my wallet. When I made a dollar, I would want two. When I made two, four is all I would need. Once I got four, I needed eight to survive. And on and on and on. The problem with this game is there is never a clear winner. There is always more to be had so as long as your mindset is focused solely on the money, you will never be satisfied.

When I think back to when I made the decision to go into music for a living, I did it for just one reason…passion. There were no “what if’s” or careers to fall back on. I never did any research on what the average musician earns. The idea that I might not succeed at it honestly never crossed my mind. I knew I could do it. In my mind the ball was already in the cup.

The interesting thing is that I have been and continue to be successful at both ventures…as a musician and through my internet marketing company Sound-n-Vision…and yet one tends to be more fulfilling than the other. But it doesn’t have to be that way…

What if I were to take that same level of passion and fulfillment I get as a musician and apply it to everything I do?  What if I approached my family, my company, my health, my community…my life…without the “what if’s” or  things to fall back on. With that same level of intensity I do as a musician? With the same values? The same blind enthusiasm?

What would life look like then?  Would I still be chasing George?  Or would George be chasing me?

• A fear of taking risks
• A fear of failure AND a fear of success (buy one get one free)
• A fear of rejection
• Reading into stuff
• Not following through
• Excuses, excuses and more excuses
• Plus a few others that I’m sure I’m leaving out

Hey, don’t start looking at me like you’re afraid to sit next to me in the lunchroom now. Whether you want to admit it or not, you have just as much stuff holding you back. Perhaps your drug of choice is feeling sorry for yourself or low self-esteem or maybe you read into everything someone says to you. Whatever it is, it’s there. Trust me. Just because you have enough common sense not to post all of your issues on your blog doesn’t mean they don’t exist and aren’t holding you back!

Anyway, what struck me as I was writing this was all of the fears I had acquired throughout the years. It wasn’t always this way. In fact, quite the opposite. My past is riddled with taking risks and stepping outside my comfort zone…sometimes it ended in very successful ventures and sometimes not so much. But at the end of the day you could never say that I didn’t put it all out there. At least not until the past few years.

I’m not really sure when things went left when they should have gone right. Maybe it was when I had kids and I felt like I needed to play it safe for their sake. Maybe it was as I was getting deeper into my thirties and felt as though I should be doing something more stable. Maybe I just took one too many risks that bit me in the ass one too many times and I was starting to run out of ass.

Or maybe it just doesn’t matter why.

Maybe all that matters is what I do about it next. I’ve been pretty fortunate over the years to experience some pretty cool things, but I still have a bucket list that is about 30 pages long and I’ll be damned if I’m going to allow these fears, excuses or otherwise terrible habits I’ve acquired to keep me from experiencing them any longer.

So, today is garbage day and all of that baggage I dragged out to the curb will be tossed in the back of some nasty-ass truck and hauled off to a landfill somewhere in New Jersey (insert joke here about all of New Jersey being a landfill). I am done playing it safe. Don’t worry…I don’t see myself jumping out of a plane or eating mushrooms anytime soon, but I do have some pretty cool ideas of what’s to come…