Finding The Line
I may have gotten ahead of myself talking about staying on the line last Friday. I’ve been chasing this dream for a very long time and know many of the steps that will get me from point A to Z. I don’t know everything, and while I do know a lot about the general principles of publishing a book, I don’t know the specific details of how my dream will come true.
We won’t know how our dream will come to fruition until it actually does. We will undoubtedly get more clarity along the way, but we won’t know specifics until it happens. Publishing my book could look like receiving 187 rejection letters from various publishers before someone finally takes a chance on me. It could also look like meeting a publisher in the wild who hears my story and asks if I ever thought about writing a book. Buying a dream car could look like saving up for many years at a job, stumbling across the exact right amount of money in an inheritance from some distant relative, or receiving the car as a gift for some good deed.
We don’t know how our dream will come true, but hoping for an inheritance or a kind stranger to make everything happen is not a good strategy. I wouldn’t rule it out as an option, especially if you’re lucky like me, but I definitely wouldn’t put all my eggs in that basket. So once we have our dream, how do we figure out which direction to go if we don’t know how we‘re supposed to get there?
Google is our best friend when it comes to this. Everything I know about getting a book published comes directly from a Google search and from reading books written by authors on that very topic. The odds are good that you are not trekking a brand new path with your dream. Someone before has done something at least similar that you can model your path off of.
I am a big fan of the CASE method when it comes to achieving dreams. Copy and steal everything! Of course, this doesn’t mean going out and replicating a rival artist’s work because we know it can sell for top dollar. It does mean trusting the advice of people who have gone ahead and finding a way to make our voices heard. If our dream is to sell a painting, then we should be talking to successful artists. How did they get their work out there? Was it posting on Instagram that got them recognition? Or maybe it was schmoozing with donors at their college? Or maybe it was just walking up to every gallery within 100 miles and asking if they would display their work?
Whatever your dream is, there are likely methods of achieving it that are significantly less effective than others. For example, building a brand on Instagram goes much faster if we post consistently. The algorithm tends to favor that (at least that’s what I think from my limited understanding) over the people who post once or twice and disappear for six weeks. I don’t need to find the worst path to achieve my dream. I also don’t need to go through the struggles the people in front of me went through. If they figured out where not to turn left the hard way, then I would trust that information and keep going straight.
When my parents started in the insurance industry, it was during a time when cell phones were barely a thing, GPS didn’t exist, and the fax machine was the peak of speedy communication. My dad would have to map out his appointments on a physical map, drive there hoping to make it to the right spot, and then return to the office to fax in his applications. The way my sister does it now involves trusting the GPS to get her where she needs to go, using her cell phone to call for help if she gets lost, and submitting the applications through e-apps while in the client’s home. She is not any less worthy of success in the industry because she doesn’t have to wait twenty minutes for a fax to be sent while hoping she has the pages facing the right way.
We don’t need to martyr ourselves when it comes to our dreams. To be clear, we will have to carve our own path in some way. There will always be an obstacle that we come up against that has to be handled in a way that works for us. And we have to keep our voice alive in our dreams. Science fiction books may be selling really well, but that is not who I am or who I am trying to be. But I can still take the principles from science fiction authors of finding an agent, prioritizing writing time, or pushing through writer’s block to help me figure out how to go about doing this.
So, to figure out the A to Z of achieving your dream, start with some research. There are probably books and podcasts that talk about this thing. There are undoubtedly Google search results that will pop up when we type in “How do I ______?” Start there and lay out the A to Z of what it takes to achieve your dream. Start with where you are at and go from there. If you already have steps 1-7 done, exclude them (or include them to feel more accomplished).
You may discover that your dream only has A through M steps or that you’ll need ZZZ. Whatever it is, that’s what it is. Sure, it would be easier if our dream was easier, but we don’t get to pick that. The only choice we have is to decide whether or not it is too hard and if we need to abandon our dream, which isn’t much of a choice, in my opinion. No matter how short or long the path may seem, we just have to get started on it. The roadmap will change as we learn, grow, and accomplish more, but we need to ensure that we are taking the right steps today, which starts with knowing where the line is to begin with.