I put my heart and soul into just about everything I do. It is pretty impossible to do this with everything because you will just drain yourself out, but with most things, I have this attitude. I have spent the last few days taking a mental vacation up in the mountains. This was much-needed in my book because I have spent day after day lifting, working, and draining myself to the last drop. There comes a time where I need to shut it down for a while and really do nothing. The point is to be able to come back and work better, work harder, and have passion for the things I am doing. I also needed to give my body a rest. I was starting to have some major aches and pains and I needed to take care of them. I have still been active up here…doing short workouts on top of the train snow sheds…climbing Mt. Judah….but these are things that were considered to be outside my normal routine. What I have discovered over the past few days is that I do need to mix my routine up. My typical day at home looks like this: wake up at 4:30 or 5 am…work till lunch…spend my lunch break at the gym lifting…work till 6 or so. It really has been nonstop, and I finally came to the realization that I just graduated. Holy hell. It finally hit me, and boy did it hit me hard. What makes things scarier is that I am starting my own business and that slightly magnifies the life after college effect.

I titled todays post Dream for a pretty significant reason. This morning I wrote a person who has been talking to me for a while now (she is struggling with some things in her life) the story of how I eventually came to writing this blog. I gave her a recap of almost 4 years of my life, and it really brought me back to a time where I was afraid to dream big. I was playing very small, and it was hurting me. Most of all, I was pushing things under the carpet and letting them hide from sight. Not a good way of doing things I promise.

But there came a point where I picked up the pieces and decided that it was time to dream. I have been a big goal setter over the past few years, and I have had some hefty goals. I always keep in mind though that failing at many goals means that you’re doing a good job setting them. When you aim incredibly high, you will fall short sometimes, but you will certainly reach a level that you wouldn’t have if you didn’t try at all. Keep this in mind. We must constantly overestimate ourselves, so if we fall short, we will have reached what we truly could have become. Victor Frankyl said something of this sort…and it always stuck with me.

There are certain things that I am letting go for the sake of growth. We have to do this with a lot of things in our life. I call this breaking to build. We have to burn out the dead wood in order to grow stronger. There’s this concept I have been dealing with for a little while now that was presented to me in the story of a blacksmith. The man said to me that if you looked at the arm of a blacksmith…you could see that it was well-built and strong from years and years of work. It comes from forging weapons, hammering away, and much resistance. You cannot build an arm like that through anything but resistance. And this is why adversity is so great for us…because the strongest tree in the forest is the first one that faces the storm. Then…its roots grow deep.

Sacrifice.

When I was little, I used to sit up in the treehouse in our yard with blankets and doze off. I would try to read books, but what ended up happening was that my eyes would get heavy and I would fall asleep in a heartbeat. I have been known to be able to fall asleep anywhere and in about 2 minutes. Sometimes people laugh at me because one second I am there in full force, and the next I am out. But there is something special that happens every single time I start to doze off. I get this feeling of warmth, light surrounds me, and off I go. I rarely dream. Maybe because I spend so much of the daytime dreaming that I zonk out completely at night. I always wake up refreshed. There was a time way back when, that the feeling of being refreshed was not there. It was more like a feeling of dread. And I truly can attribute this feeling to something that I have stood for: love, passion, never quit. When you know what you stand for, it makes it incredibly easy to make decisions. When you know what your goals are…life because that much more fun.

Dream big. You must…because you can. You weren’t given the soul of yours to play it small. Dreams come at a cost though. Do not expect it to come easy. I always have said that if you are going to play a big game in life, you better expect big problems. Welcome them…it means you’re on the right track.

Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project