Maybe money was my motivation. If I got cereal-box famous, there would be new sources of revenue for my company. I’d no longer just deal with businessmen; I’d become the Dr. Phil of Estonia. I’d have my own television show and help everyone lead better lives and cure cancer and end world hunger and feel good about myself and make gobs more money so I could do whatever it is I’d do if I had gobs more money. Maybe.
Another motivation could have been simply a desire to win. I have to admit that from the first moment I began thinking about this show, I wasn’t thinking about going on the show. I was thinking about winning the thing. I know for me this is sometimes not a healthy motivator because it can become an obsession. Setting your sights that high is also a pretty good recipe for disappointment. I like to win, be the best, do my thing really well. If you’re not the lead dog then you’ve got your nose under someone else’s tail, and all that kind of thinking. (I can still tell you exactly how many books I sold door to door in the United States every summer I worked for Southwestern. And I can still tell you the name of the girl who set the company record that year, and exactly how much she sold.)
If I was going to go on this show, I would need to manage my time in order to have enough and more time for learning to dance better so that I could win it. I knew that it was not about just dancing skills. I knew that at the final stages the audience votes, and how known you are to the general public counts more than the actual dancing. And that the best dancer might not win at all. But like many motivated, successful people, I didn’t care. Whatever the prize was really for – dancing, popularity, best smile – I wanted to win it for the sake of winning.
Second question: Did I believe it was possible to win? Absolutely. I was in excellent physical shape. My health was fine. I was thin and flexible. I have a good memory and believed I could easily learn the dance steps. And who was I up against? Many weren’t as fit as I (though there was one professional athlete). But all were surely highly motivated and all were successful within their own fields. But would they be willing to put the time into it that I was willing to? Probably not. I have always been willing to work harder than everyone else. Why should this have been an exception? Sure, I believed I could win the show. Whatever the requirements or criteria for victory, I could win.
But the third question was the kicker. Was I willing to pay the price? Could I even guesstimate the price? Price is almost always misleading. Whatever you think the price is, it’s usually more. Have you ever built a home? No one ever estimates that properly. You always hope it’ll be cheaper than your estimate, but it usually comes in 20 or 30 percent more. Then you have to buy the furniture! It’s the same with your time. It inevitably requires more time to complete something than you estimate, even when you’re being conservative.
The more I jogged and the more I thought about the subject, the more unsure I became. Dancing would probably at some point be the only thing I’d be doing. Looking at the calendar and my other tasks ahead of me I realized that if I went all the way I’d probably have to cancel a new seminar I had planned for that fall. I just could not finish the preparations on time. Would I be willing to commit several hours a day if I wanted to win? My early enthusiasm for winning turned to doubt. It started to dawn upon me that it was more about whether or not I should go at all and not so much about if I wanted to win or not.
Finally I decided to go for it. Why? I realized that only after the fact. You see, in my work, I’m the one who encourages others to seek challenges and accept the ones presented to them. I must have felt back then that by not accepting the invitation it would go against what I was teaching others, making me a hypocrite. To prepare for the show, I used the seven decision making questions and set a goal of winning the competition. (These seven questions are discussed in detail in chapter 4). In retrospect, I worked really hard – perhaps too hard – to win the show. And even though I did not win (I came third), I gained a lot of other things thanks to taking part it in. Was it all worth the effort and time? Not really. Would I do it again, if I could wind back time and make the same decision all over again? Most likely not.
But that is my story. What do you want? Not for others, not for societal requirements, but for you. What is it that you really want? What do you want most right now?
CHAPTER TWO
Dream big dreams
Restaurant la Vie
C’est la vie. It’s a common expression, but I’ve never liked it much. “That’s life.” It’s mostly used to communicate that life is harsh but we must accept it. It’s often delivered by a friend or parent to suggest we had set our expectations too high.
I like to begin my seminars by asking people to imagine that we are all dining at the imaginary Restaurant la Vie, where they have no printed menu, because you can order whatever you want. What do you want? Everything is available. Some things may take a little longer for the cook to prepare. The prices for some items are higher than others. Some things have fancy-sounding names that you may not fully understand and that may not live up to their promise. But everything is available. Anything you want, you can have.
What if everything in life were available to you?
There are, of course, a few exceptions. Perhaps by accident of birth and reasons of citizenship, you cannot become the President of the United States or King or Queen of England. Or perhaps you do not possess the gift from God necessary to become a famous concert pianist or the world champion of chess.
But if you lived in a world where nearly everything was on the menu, what would you order? Could you even believe this is possible? And what could be the consequences of such belief? What would you then choose? How would you go about ordering?
What kind of restaurant do you dine in now? Do they serve haute cuisine? Or is it a cafeteria? Or is it one of those Soviet restaurants where the knife is chained to the table and you have to ask what they have, because even though there are two hundred items on the menu (with their weight in grams next to each one), they only have the pork?
What kind of restaurant would you like to dine in? Would you like to dine in Restaurant la Vie? I think we’d all like to eat in a better restaurant. And in Restaurant la Vie, the menu is yours to create. The menu is created by dreaming.
Broken illusions and forgotten dreams
What do I mean by dreaming? In its simplest form, dreaming is thinking about things. Or thinking about future possibilities. About different scenarios for you and your life. What are your recurrent thoughts? As you do your morning run, work in the garden or sit alone there at your kitchen table with a cup of coffee, what thoughts keep coming back to you? What images? What ideas? What are the things you keep telling yourself you’d do if you had more time or more money or both? What are you longing for? What is missing from your life? Or, if you’re one of the lucky few for whom everything seems just right, then what could enable you to have even more fun than you’re having right now?
But what if you are one of those who simply does not dream? If you are one of those highly left-brain, pragmatic rationalists, who will not indulge in such impracticality? Certainly as we grow older, many of us stop dreaming at one point or another. But we all have dreamed before. When we were kids, for sure. Before we get deeper into dreaming, it’s important to consider the possibility of what limits our dreams, or even keeps us from dreaming altogether.
Everybody has heard of a mid-life crisis, which I personally prefer to term a mid-life transition. All people go through it, some more consciously than others. And while at it, many also experience disillusionment. It usually happens around the age of 40, but it can also happen much earlier. Whatever the age (but usually as the second half of one’s life is starting), all of us have to make peace with the fact that some of our childhood dreams will never be fulfilled.
In my seminars, I have seen over and over again that many people toss the entire concept of dreaming out the window. They hunker down like an ox and start pulling the plow. Sometimes I joke that