image via mie2002

As I began writing the blog THE DREAM IN ACTION.com I decided to read about about making dreams realities and how people are doing that in the real world today. About a month ago I reached out to the publisher of the book ‘Put Your Dream To The Test’ by John C Maxwell, and I was sent a free copy of the book (awesome perk of writing a blog). I dove into the book a week or so ago and I’ve decided that the content is so good that I’m going to do a bit of a series on it. The series will not be a complete review of the book, but think of it as part book report, part my thoughts on dream achievement, and part direct quotes. I hope that I can convince you to check out the book and put your dream to the test because the value I’ve experienced so far has definitely exceed the cost of the book.

Maxwell’s book is broken up in to 10 sections or questions that you need to be able to honestly ask yourself in order to put your dream to the test and evaluate the likely hood of it coming true.

• Ownership – Is your dream your dream?
• Clarity- Do you clearly see your dream?
• Reality – Is it in your control?
• Passion – Does it inspire you?
• Pathway – Do you have a strategy?
• People – Who will help you get there?
• Cost – What will you have to give up?
• Tenacity – Are you moving towards it?
• Fulfillment – Are you happy?
• Significance – Who else benefits?

Today I’d first like to pull a topic from Maxwell’s book. The idea of keeping your dream in focus, and the importance of focus in order to make any dream come to fruition.

The problem:

You must define it before you can pursue it. Most people don’t do that. Their dream remains a dream — something fuzzy and unspecific. As a result, they never achieve it.

The solutions (taken from the book):

A clear dream…

1. …Makes A General Idea Very Specific

This is the first step to any goal. People who say, “I want to be rich”, stay poor. People who say, “I want to lose weight”, stay fat. On the opposite end, people who say, “I want to be a millionaire by 40 doing XYZ business”, are already on their way to achieving it. The person who says, “I will lose 40 pounds in 6 months by doing XYZ diet and workout plan”, they’ll get fit for sure.

The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: decide what you want.

-Ben Stein

The reason that so many people are unhappy in their jobs or with their career path is that they don’t know what their ideal job or career path is. It’s not easy to identify either. How can I know exactly what I’d want to do when I’ve only had 2 or 3 jobs? The key to identifying those things is to be brutally honest with yourself and ask questions that will consciously or subconsciously pull out the answers. There are file clerks that love their job because it allows them to go sailing on the weekend, on the other hand, there are professional baseball players who hate their job because they don’t get to spend enough time with family. It’s all about figuring out what is important to you and defining your goal, very specifically.

2. …Doesn’t become clear without effort

Accomplishing your goals isn’t supposed to be easy, and like I said before identifying them is one of the toughest steps. You have to be creative and resourceful in the dream identification process. If it came easily everyone would know what they want to do, it’s not and that’s why you’ll be ahead of the game after reading this post.

Use the books you read to identify your passions and interests. If you’re bored after reading 1 chapter of a science book, maybe you shouldn’t be a scientists. In my case, I could read about entrepreneurship all day so that’s what I’ve chosen to learn about and explore. I dream of being on the cover of Inc. Magazine. Those stories and more importantly the people in those stories inspire me. I used that inspiration to identify my dreams.

3. …Affirms your purpose

I agree with John Maxwell in that a person’s dream and purpose are intertwined. The more clearly you work to define your dream, the more clear your purpose will become. The satisfaction and confidence you’ll find in knowing your purpose will lead to an even greater sense that your dreams will be achieved.

God designs us to want to do what we are most capable of doing.

-John C Maxwell

I recently wrote about mistakes for a writing contest on Chris Guillebeau’s blog and what I learned in writing that is how much not having purpose can lead to bad work, incomplete projects, and failure in general. Purpose and dreams need to not only be intertwined but they need to overlap a lot. If your fulfilling your dreams without a purpose I question if they’re really YOUR dreams. And if your fulfilling your life’s purpose but not your dreams then I question if it’s really YOUR purpose. Work, passionately, to identify both and it will change your life.

4. …Determines your priorities

When you have a dream, and you want it to come true you will no doubt put a plan together in order to achieve your goal. Once that plan is in place and you realize what needs to occur in order to become successful, and your priorities will change to fit that plan. That plan, in fact, will become your priority if #2 and #3 are in order (dream & purpose).

Your dream will become your true north. What I mean by that is, when you run into challenging decisions or questions that need to be answered use your dream as the deciding factor.

• Should I spend 100% of my bonus on XYZ?
  • Yes, if it gets me closer to my dream.

• Should I go out tonight even though job XYZ should get done?
  • No, if it doesn’t get me closer to my dream.

• Should I hire this person just because they’re my friend and I own them one?
  • No, if it doesn’t get me closer to my dream.

Overall, the decision making process becomes very easy once you suppress your immediate emotional reaction and instead consult your dream. Deep down you’ll know what is productive and what isn’t.

5. …Gives directions and motivation to the team

People never support something they can’t understand. That’s why for a while there Sarah Palin was getting such overwhelming support. She originally came off as “common”. People could relate with her, understand her position as a wife and mother. Finally they had a politician they could relate with. As soon as she changed her tone to the public, dress more expensively, and become more “politician like” she lost her following.

Lack of clarity hinders initiative, inhibits persistence, and undermines follow-through. Followers don’t give their best to something they don’t understand.

-John C Maxwell

There is no doubt that most dreams people have are unachievable if attempted alone. You need the right people to support and build with you towards your dream. So once you have your dream defined you need to begin to sell, recruit, and build a team of people to help you along the way. Having a clear vision of your dream will drive towards a clear understanding from your team.

The final step is passionately communicating that vision (which brings us full circle to purpose). Have the picture of your dream so clearly drawn up that it is simple to explain and simple to buy into. Now, that you’ve put in lot’s of effort to specifically define your dream, and it’s supported by the purpose of your existence, your priorities will fall into place and you’ll be able to execute and make your dreams reality.

I’ve been working in Uppsala, Sweden, about 45 minutes north of Stockholm, this week and have learned a few very valuable business lessons. I was lucky to have the opportunity to travel when most other travel opportunities have been cut, and I’ve really focused on making the most of the trip.

Coming into the week I wanted to focus on really investing myself fully into the deliverables that I’d committed to in order to justify the trip and also through building relationships that are critical in order to successfully execute on the project in the future. With those two focuses in mind, I’ve learned quite a lot and have, I think, succeeded in both.

Investing Yourself Emotionally

Many times, at home, I have so many different projects going that I struggle to focus on one thing at a time. With work priorities, project interests, family obligations, and finally lowest on the priority list, personal time, it becomes tough to balance and focus on any one of the tasks. This week, being away from home, I decided to completely remove myself and focus on work whole heatedly. The results have been phenomenal.

When you’re traveling for business you travel with people who you basically have one thing in common, work. This inevitably drives dinner conversation towards work topics and because of this I’ve been able to learn a lot. Being on the younger side of the group I’ve just listened and have been able to learn from others experiences. I’ve openly challenged ideas so that I can really get to the source of a particular issue and really extract the value from it. Without being pulled out of the normal flow of a day back home, and without being really focused on the work and issues at hand, I likely never would have had these conversations, nor learned so much from my colleagues. Sometimes it takes a bit of a shake up to create these situations.

By investing myself and focusing completely on work I’ve really maximized the the value of the trip. Both for the business and for myself. Now, with perfect weather in Sweden and the weekend approaching I plan to fully invest myself in the culture of Stockholm. I’m going mountain biking with a Swedish colleague on Saturday and hitting the Stockholm clubs on Saturday evening. If you’re not doing it all, your not doing enough!

Building Relationships to Get Things Done

Early in the week it was clear that there were major “perspective” differences in how to approach our project. We were unaligned and working towards similar goals without any collaboration. It was clear that a recalibration of focus was critical and the team needed to be rejuvenated. Working in IT it is often easy to become the claimed cause of a “business problem” when in reality we are here to help solve and avoid problems.

Instead of taking the defensive stand, I told the team, “we’ve got to align goals and make these relationships work for the good of the project and of the underlying business needs”. After significant back-and-forth sessions exchanging fairly opposing views, solutions were landed upon and I believe (only time will tell) that we, as a whole, came out on top. There was not a sense of win-or-lose, but more a feeling of joint progress and accomplishment. With stronger relationships now in place, we’ll be able to collaborate better when working over the phone and divide and concur tasks that would be fought over in the past.

Often times it seems that a solution may never be reached but usually people will come around. All it takes is the ability to bring similar goals to the surface. If you can create a similar goal and/or direction you can begin to move and work together in ways that you never could have in the past! You will surely enjoy the people you are working with more and in turn you will start to love your work. So often, it’s not the work that makes the process enjoyable, it’s the people that you interact with and the people that challenge you that make it fun!

I wanted to revisit some of the content of that discussion to emphasize what a startup needs to focus on within a very tight economic environment. When the DJI is down 40% from this time last year things change. Budgets have been cut, investment capital has been reduced, and now only the best will get funding. I’m going to pull one out of my fathers book: “I’m not going to tell you what to do, but here is what I would do if I were you…”

Get Lean

I don’t mean just start running and eating well (although that may help). I mean reduce the FAT of your startup! Stop paying somebody to do sales if your product isn’t ready to be sold. Look for small inefficiencies that can be improved. If your development teams finds that they are spending excess time on bug fix, think about changing your development strategy. Obie Fernandez’s team at Hashrocket, employs the “Pair Programming” strategy. You may think it would be a waste for two to do the work of one but the time and effort save on bug fix is huge. Focus on two words when looking to LEAN your startup, EFFICIENT & EFFECTIVE.

Focus

This one also implies that there are decisions to be made. The obvious is, what to focus on? Well don’t take this advice and go put yourself in a cave coding. It is super important that you focus on the product from a user feedback perspective. You need to be out there building your community and asking for feedback from them. If you don’t know what your community thinks of your alpha release, how do you even know what to code? It is very important that you are out there building relationships and building opportunities for future collaboration and growth with other entities. The startup ecosystem is alive and well, if you are not tapping that (ass) your really missing out.

Profits

You used to be able to sell your 100k views with no monetization strategy to VCs… that might not work these days. Today your going to have to prove that you have value the old fashion way…sell (which implies someone is paying real $$$). It’s important now to show investors that you can actually make money. Jason Fried (37 Signals) talks about not having to build a  Domino’s, but just build a profitable Mom & Pop pizza shop that makes money month after month. Profits will become more and more critical and you may have to make difficult decisions to get there. Even Google is cutting back, so your startup will likely have to also. The gist here is focus on the bottom line!

Then Loic Lemeur chimed into the conversation (and referenced a conversation I earlier had with Loic!) with his thoughts on  content, community, and an intense step by step focus.These are the people that I listen to closest when fighting through the trials that come along with building a start-up. Their experiences and opinions are invaluable to my development as an entrepreneur.