After spending the past 4 days away from Future Wife, my dog Indy, my home, and my typical routine of non-stop kick-assery, I’ve realized that I want to get back to my life.

Doesn’t that sound weird? For the past 4 days I’ve been in sunny Las Vegas, NV where we’ve spent most of our time eating great food, seeing awesome sights (we went for a trip up to Red Rock Canyon – awesome!), we’ve had a blast gambling, we’ve seen Penn & Teller, and I have had a metric shit-ton of fun.

But I can’t wait to get back to my life.

 I think it was Seth Godin who said, ‘Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you ought to set up a life you don’t need to escape from.’

A really strange paradox is presented here, because I travel a lot. Future Wife and I are gone 50% of the weekends in a year. It seems that I’ve designed a life of perpetual escape and because of this I never really need to escape it (because I am always escaping?) But this is most likely a topic best suited for another article.

What I’d like to talk about is the very first step I made to building this life.

I can remember a time when all I wanted to do was talk about what I will be doing. Not what I AM doing, but what I will be doing in the future. That life was a constant stream of things I said I will do, but never actually did. My dreams were firmly set one month, 6 months, or a year in front of me and never got any closer. Every idea I had was talked about until it was beaten to death.

I remember these days and, honestly, I did have some fun during this time of my life. But the moments where I had the most fun were very simple, often times it was just eating lunch with a friend. The moments that I have the worst memories of are the times I would spend dreaming and discarding dreams. Talking about ideas and never executing them.

The fun in that past life came from simple actions and all the pain came from lofty dreaming and never working towards those dreams. (The second part is important here. Action always trumps inaction, but without some dreaming you won’t have anything to act on.)

The turning point in my life showed up for me when I left my sales job. I had no income and I had to very quickly decide what I wanted to do. This was the start of my IT carrier. I remember, for the first time in my life, I had dreamt a lofty dream and did something with it that I had never done before.

I began to execute it.

I took small, simple, steps each day towards building a dream. At the time, the dream was to be a big shot IT security consultant. As of today, this has changed a humorous amount, but the principle is still the same.

6 years later, I am still doing the same thing. I dream A LOT. I am constantly dreaming. But the difference now is that I begin to take small steps towards making these dreams a reality. I take action.

The difference now is that I always talk about what I am doing or what I have done. Rarely do I talk about what I will do, and even if I do there is a good chance that I will actually do it.

I dream a lot, I work a lot to achieve those dreams, and a lot of those dreams die off and fail. That’s okay. I’ve got more dreams.

I’m a dream machine, baby.

Technically, this is a (sweet) drawing of the dream machine from Inception. But this is totes what my brain looks like on the inside!

This has been a critical element in constructing a life that I am eager to return to, even after experiencing the decadence and fanfare of Las Vegas. Dreams are fuel for your actions, but you’ve got to burn that fuel to get yourself moving forward. Some dreams will be tossed aside after you’ve put a lot of work into them, and sometimes you won’t have enough time to even begin working on another. That’s all part of the process.

The most important part is to take action. Start small. Break down the steps to your dreams into tiny, tiny parts and complete the very first one. I’ll admit that the first time is the most difficult. It’s very hard to see the small steps leading up to the big dream. Keep practicing even if the first few times you stumble and fall. We all fell when we were learning to walk. We all learned to walk well because we got back up.

Break your dreams down into specific goals and set a timeline to accomplish them by. Break the timelines down smaller and smaller until you get tasks to complete each day. I set up aggressive goals because I’m a Focus junkie. I love the feeling of having a goal to focus on and work towards. Since I’m a Focus junkie, I don’t have any problems sticking to goals (even if I do fail hard). Find out what makes you stick to your goals.

Work your ass off. Even if you fail, you will have failed in the most spectacular way possible. No one will ever fault you for that (and if they do, they’re probably just jealous that you’re kicking more ass than they are =) If your outcome is failure or if it is success, take a moment to learn what you can from your experience, and get right on dreaming again.

Can I help? What big dream are you waiting to take action on because you’re having trouble finding the first step?

The sweet dream machine drawing came from Gaynoir who has been wonderful in letting others freely use this work!

Vegas photo courtesy of the fine Geoffrey Gilson – Licensed under Creative Commons – Check out more sweet photos here!