Are you realizing your full potential?

What would your life look like if you had everything you ever wanted, achieved everything you could ever achieve, and lived a purposeful life spending your days doing things that lit your soul on fire?

I’m guessing it would look much different than it does now.

But, why is that?

Why is it so easy to assume that you are not reaching your full potential in life?

It’s so obvious because so many people go through life never even considering this. It’s normal.

It’s normal to wake up and go to a job you don’t enjoy and doesn’t pay enough. It’s normal to put on a smile and say everything is great when in reality, we are all holding on by a thread. 

It is normal to spend the majority of your waking hours away from your family. It is normal to spend just two weeks out of the year on ‘vacation’.

Normal is mundane. Normal is limiting.

I don't know about you but I don't want to live a limited and mundane life.

I want to experience everything life has to offer. I want to find my true purpose in life and work every day to fulfill it.

I don’t want to be normal.

I spent far too much of my life being normal, and when I look back on it all I realize how obvious it was that a normal life was never what I was meant for.

I remember going to college because it was the normal thing to do. It took three semesters for me to drop out (not normal). I decided when I was 19 years old that the restaurant industry was what I was going to make my career out of (not normal). 

I spent a lot of my life trying to be normal while at the same time not being normal. I think a lot of it had to do with me just wanting to be independent. I started working full-time, I moved out of my parents' house, and I was fully independent. But it took over 10 years to realize that I was never truly happy.

I spent so much time striving for independence, that I made myself dependent on a job and a career.

I spent years and years working too much, drinking too much, eating like garbage, and not taking care of myself physically, mentally, or emotionally.

Finally, one day, I decided enough was enough. I decided I wasn’t going to live a shitty life any longer. I decided to make a change.

That decision was almost 2 years ago. It didn’t happen overnight, but I have come a long way.

Little by little I started making better decisions to be the best version of myself that I could be. I stopped smoking weed. I started working out again. I started eating better. I spent more time in nature. I worked on meditation. I started reading. 

Yes, I also left my management job. I went back to bartending as a stop-gap so that I could figure out what to do with my life. 

I started learning about online business. I learned about video editing, copywriting, SEO, etc. 

I focused on getting a little better every day.

And eventually, a little luck came my way.

I found some people who were looking for help with their video editing and social media. While luck may have played a part in the opportunities that I have found, I can say with 100% certainty that without the actions I took every day from the day I decided to change, luck would have never found me.

It may sound cliche, but you make your luck. Or you at least become the person that luck finds, with the decisions you make and the actions you take.

If you are unhappy with the way your life is going, you and only you can change it. Only you can make decisions to put yourself in a different situation.

Now you’re probably thinking, that would never work for me.

But, I promise you it can. If you let it.

If there is anything that I have learned over the past few years it's that I may not be in control of everything that happens to me, but I am for damn sure in control of how I respond and how I let things affect me. 

If I can go from where I was, I burnt out bar manager who was out of shape, disconnected with himself, and drank too much to who I am now, a 31-year-old man who is in the best shape he’s been in since high school and spends his days doing the things he enjoys, you can too.

Remember when you were a kid and your parents would tell you that you can be anything you want to be. At the time you didn’t realize that they might have been lying, but I am here saying that they didn’t realize that they were telling the truth.

You can do anything you want to do. You can find a way to make money doing it. You can spend your days doing things that give you purpose. You can be truly happy. You can reach your full potential.

That catch is…

You have to do the work. Nobody is going to do it for you.

But I’ll be here to help along the way.