Pursuing Dreams and The Walking Dead

There are few shows on the air currently that are as compelling as The Walking Dead. The constant fear of attack, the human relationships and the Everyone that has watches The Walking Dead inevitably compare themselves to the main characters. I’ve heard countless people fantasize how they would survive if they were surrounded by zombies. I admit, I think I would do a pretty good job of staying alive if the Zombie Apocalypse happens, but of course that’s easy for me to say on my side of the TV screen. I imagine the stress, fear and hopelessness that would accompany that reality would be debilitating.

But wait…

Uh oh! The more I compared myself with those characters still surviving, the less I found I had in common.
Oh no!
Like in a movie, I had a flash of my dreams and realized how far I was away. I quickly turned to the left and to the right… where was I? With the stress of life and an extreme desire to follow my unfulfilled dreams I’ve started to relate to other characters from the show other than our heroes… I wasn’t trying to survive, I was giving up and turning into…

The Undead!

Had I been bitten and didn’t know it? Had I been transformed from fun-loving zombie slayer into a brain-loving zombie drooler? I don’t remember, but then again, what do I remember? The last real moment I can recall is realizing what my dreams are, but then life got in the way. Bills, work, responsibility, fun, sleep… REALITY.

The more I thought about it the more I realized that, currently, I have more in common with the zombies than I do the rest of the cast. If you watch the show you’ll see the undead walking aimlessly and searching for sustenance, not with a plan, but randomly and arbitrarily. The only way a zombie will find food is if a live human gets too close or moves too slow. This is equivalent to thinking that you’ll pay your bills by winning the lottery. It’s foolish and unwise, but I’m finding that many of us (including myself) are pursuing our dreams in a similar fashion.
without realizing it, I had been attacked and consumed by reality, or (for purposes of this post) by the zombie-brain eaters!

We can’t expect for our dreams to fall in our laps.
We have to be proactive, intentional and disciplined, but sometimes our present reality keep us from moving toward our goals. Here are three steps to make sure you (and your dreams) stay alive and aren’t consumed by the zombie hoard!
1. Create Margin… You have to find space (or margin) in your life in order to even have a chance for your dreams to grow. If you can’t breath from all the stress and pressure of life then you will have a hard time making space to put your dreams into action. That being said, if you don’t have much margin in your life then it may be extremely difficult to dream at all. Its like treading water in the ocean without a life jacket on. You will eventually get tired and start to sink. Margin in your life preserver in a world that is constantly throwing new responsibilities and duties without relieving you of the old ones.

2. Have A Plan… You can’t walk into zombie infested streets without having some sense of what you will do if they catch wind of you. Similarly, if you don’t have a plan the you really don’t know if you are succeeding or failing.

3. Follow Others… There is no better way to get ahead than to follow other’s examples. I recently heard LeBron James talking about the fact that it was his idolization of Michael Jordan that planted the seed inside his head to be the best basketball player he could be. Talk to most successful people and they would agree that getting to the next level requires that you stand on a someone else’s shoulders.

We will go deeper into each of these steps in future posts to give you a great framework for success.

Reality (like zombies) wants to take you down.
Survival is difficult with all the distractions, pitfalls and minutia that stand in your way. If you find that there is a field of walking-dead between you and your dreams you can prevail if you create margin, have a plan and follow other’s examples.

How have you, like a zombie, approached life, and what can you do today to change that? Let me know in the comments below, and let’s find ways to encourage and help each other out.