Growing up, I had this friend who was legitimately poor, but he had what a lot of people felt were stars in his eyes. He would always tell everyone he was going to grow up and drive a fancy car and travel the world. Just about everyone, knowing his situation from family and friends, myself included, told him in one way or another, it probably wasn't going to happen. My friend always believed in the dream and over the years, he never let his vision go no matter what anyone said. He had a folder he kept with him with pictures and notes of all the things he wanted for his life and he would show it off with pride and people would just entertain him or laugh at him, but the folder would get bigger with more and more of his dreams as the years went by. Cut to ten years later and he is indeed an international traveler, recently engaged, is on his third luxury vehicle, lives in an expensive condo, has got his Ph.D., hob nobs with the mayor, you name it.
We all have something in us that we want to do and want to accomplish and just like my friend, we may have told someone like a friend or family or even a co-worker what we wanted to do and gotten the same treatment. Everyone is or has their set of haters who either legitimately want you to fail or who seem to only live to put the seeds of doubt in your mind as to your actual abilities when it comes to achieving your goals. It's the same old classic story, of "how bad do YOU want it?"
Anybody can tell you, you will fail especially if your dream is like my friends where it's going to take an enormous amount of work to achieve, but there has to be that voice in your head that allows you to keep your eye on the prize. This becomes more true the older you get because as a kid, it's easy to say a parent is holding me back or they control my life, but once you turn 18, you can't just fall back on blaming them for everything that is happening to you because you don't have to live under their roof, you are an adult, and if you want something at that point, it is literally up to you, and you alone, to go out there and get it.
It's easy to look at my friend now and think, the end result is so easy, but it's the challenges and the struggles and the failures that led up to that point that a lot of times we're afraid to have to go through to get to our own dreams and goals. We allow ourselves to listen to the voice of our haters who tell us we will fail or that what we want is impossible. Every single person who has ever achieved anything in this life, or invented something, or gotten their degrees has had a few or a whole lot of people trying to hold them back or telling them there is an easy way around the hard work it takes to achieve such goals. It sounds counter-intuitive, but listen to your haters. Take everything they are saying and use it as motivation to prove not only them wrong, but to prove yourself right. They want you to fail because it some way that failure validates them, it makes their lives seem that much better than your own if you fail, it's something they can hold over you, but don't let that happen.
Get a goal in mind. Write it down. Go after it. Don't allow yourself to be mediocre and live under a shadow of failed accomplishments. Dreams and goals as evidenced by my friend, aren't just for the wealthy, or those of a certain race or gender, or have a time limit or age limit. Use every single morsel and crumb of what you're haters are saying to make you mad, and to turn that madness into action.
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