There’s work and your life’s work - which type of work do you spend most of your time doing?

Someday I’ll get down to the weight I want.

Someday I’ll start my own company.

Someday I’ll travel around the world.

Of course I’ll do it, someday.

Someday always sounds good.  It  allows us to convince ourselves that we are serious about our deepest goals and ambitions, while at the same time requiring zero output to make them come to fruition.  Someday is a great way to pretend we are doing something when we are really planning on doing nothing.  The unfortunate truth is that, for most of us, someday is really just codeword for never.  

You can talk about someday all you want but the only person you will be fooling is yourself.  If you’re serious about it, at some point and time, someday must transform into today.

The problem with having unlimited voice is that we make the mistake of thinking everyone wants to listen.

The problem with thinking everyone wants to listen is that it makes us talk too much.

The problem with talking too much is that we spend all of our time talking and very little time doing.

The problem with spending very little time doing is that nothing actually gets done.

If you want to make a difference in this world, go make something. Launch a company. Create a blog. Start a movement. Rally people around your kickstarter project.  While everyone else is talking their little heads off, you’ll be one of the few actually getting something done.  Go make something.

On the other hand, saying no quite is difficult.  As a leader or employee in your company, you create your value, not by knowing when to say yes, but by knowing when to say no.   No we cannot hire this person because they are not right for our culture.  No we cannot pursue this direction because it is not on strategy.  No we cannot execute this idea because we are already overwhelmed and have ten other projects that are more meaningful to the business.  ”No” may not make you a lot friends, but it will make sure you deliver results.  

I was fortunate enough to be featured in the exhibit this time around.  Feel free to check out my letter, I think it is applicable to all, no matter what stage in life you find yourself.

Also, check out some of the other work done by the photographer, Jamaica Gilmer (who has also become a friend).  She is the founder of an amazing initiative called, The Beautiful Project, which was designed to use photography to help young, Black girls define what it means to be beautiful inside and out.

“When you really want something to happen, the whole world conspires to help you achieve it.”

What Cuehlo and Cain teach us is that, before the world will rally behind your dream, you have to prove that you really want your dream first. Not the empty “I want that Snicker’s bar” kind of want, but the type of desire and longing for something that is so deep that it produces passion, resillence and action. The type of want that forces you to give the best of your imagination to your imagination.  The type of want that makes you willing to pour and pour into your dream despite having to watch the world keep passing it by.

The world is waiting to help you achieve your dream; have you let it know how much you really want it?

When it comes to romantic relationships, we want love to be the end all, be all. We want it to be all we ever need–a to z and soup to nuts.  But, at the end of the day, it’s just not.  Love has its purpose but it also has it’s limitations, one of which, is it’s ability to keep people together.

The key to staying together is alignment, not love.  That’s why you can find couples that love each other to death, but split a part because they do not agree on how many children they should have (or if they should have children at all) or where they both should live or the respective roles they should play in each other’s lives.  On the flip side, you can find couples that no longer love each other, yet still stay together because of their agreed upon cultural or spiritual beliefs.  Or because they have agreed that they will stay together “for the children.”  Staying together “for the children” may also entail making an agreement not to sleep together in the same room or be intimate any more, but they can manage to stay together because they have managed to “agree.”

Don’t underestimate the power of alignment; it is one of the most critical aspects you will need to develop in a relationship if you plan to make it last.

Love provides a foundation.  Alignment keeps the structure together.  Making the whole thing work-takes a combination of the two. 

In life, we know the “planners path;” it is the most well known path (the one I, myself, took).  It’s the one that says: graduate from high school, go to college, get a graduate degree (because a college degree is no longer good enough) and a nice job.  But we also see “desire paths,” new, successful paths created by people who don’t follow the formula laid out for the rest of us.  Take Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, who failed to pass by an MBA, yet is a billionaire who has also created wealth for so many others.  Or Julie Aigner-Clark of Baby Einstein, a stay at home mom who failed to take the “climb the corporate ladder” route, and generated a company out of the basement of her house that is now worth 100s of millions.

Yes, there is a “planners path” out there that has been outlined for all of us. The path is pretty safe and relatively stable.  But recognize there are desire paths–tried and true dirt paths others have created–that may suit you better. Don’t be afraid to get your sneakers dirty and follow their footpath to find your success.  And even more so, recognize there are desire paths that have yet to be created; don’t be afraid to jump off the sidewalk and be the first to pave a new way to success–your tracks just may create the course thousands of others are waiting follow. 

The reason we are willing to forfeit closeness to the people we love, in the heat of the moment, is because we assign bigness to the wrong thing.  Instead of making the relationship bigger than our issue, we allow the issue to be bigger than our connection (at least at the time) to our loved one.  In our moment of pain, we make a short-sighted decision that could have a lasting impact on our lives.

Always make the people you love bigger than any issue.  What’s bigger than your spouse?  What’s bigger than your bff?  What’s bigger than your father?  For most of us, the answer should be nothing.  Don’t let the heat of battle confuse you, even when you know you’re right and they are wrong.  Keep close.  Love through the pain.  Love through the sting.  Because when bite is over, you’ll be happy to find the person you love is still there-already loving you back.

So many of us are square pegs in round holes.  Rather than looking internally at what makes us unique (our talents and passions) and letting that drive us, we look externally and chase things that are not quite the right fit for us.  It may work temporarily, but don’t fool yourself, in the long run, the person who is in a field that is aligned with who they are will always outperform the square peg in the round hole.

So you can choose to find a hole that fits you perfectly or you can continue trying to cram yourself in a space that wasn’t made for you.  The choice is yours.   But trust me, you don’t want to spend your lifetime being beat by the round pegs who got it right.