Sometimes I put contacts that don’t know me too well because they are forced to share what little they know. After that, they assume, they predict, they judge honestly.

It’s often more remarkable to hear where other people think you are going in life than it is to hear people say where you told them that you think you are going in life.

It’s a risk, definitely. Hasn’t failed me yet.

Stay Positive & Truth Will Out

Garth E. Beyer

Tim Gallen is a friend of mine who is chasing his dream. Here is what he has to say about it. (Thank you, Tim, for writing this up.)

Stay Positive & Enjoy The Read… And The Chase

Garth E. Beyer

Enter Tim: 

They say a funny thing happens when you chase a dream.

They say the more real you try to make it, the more you try to birth an idea, make a dream come true, the more doubt gets in your face.

I didn’t NOT believe this, of course. I mean, I’ve been around the InterWebs, have heard through the digital grapevine whispers of such incidents. Times when people – excited, energetic, passionate people – pursued their dream but kept feeling uncertain: What if this doesn’t work? What if I fail? What if I’m not cut out for this?

But reading and hearing about something is completely different from feeling it firsthand.

I know this because I’m experiencing it right now.

For years, my brothers and I have had aspirations to tell stories using video. In other words, we’ve wanted to make movies.

This is a dream we’ve talked about ad nauseum. And for the longest time, that’s all it was: talk. Short bursts of excitable, dreamy-eyed chatter that gave way to the pressing obligations and reality of day-to-day life.

Until last year, when we finally reached a point of enough-is-enough. It was time to make a go of this dream of ours. We planned and plotted, recruited and recorded. It took us longer than we originally hoped and wanted, but we created a promotional video for a spoofy web series called Harbor Shores. It was an idea we’d had for a while and one we thought was perfect for launching our foray into visual storytelling.

I can’t speak for my brothers, but you’d think at this point, I’d be feeling the doubt creep up my spine. Well, honestly, I didn’t.

You see, we used this promo as part of a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to produce our first season of our show. From the middle of March through the middle of April, my brothers and I – along with some amazing support from friends and family – blasted social media and talked up our project. We managed to raise enough to fund our project.

And, while ecstatic about chasing the dream, a tiny voice called from my subconscious: “Why are you wasting your time?”

Truthfully, I may not have heard it the first few times. But you gotta hand it to forms of resistance – fear, doubt, anxiety, et al. – they’re nothing if not persistent. They gnaw away at you like a dog chewing a bone. They wear you down, tire you out. Persistent.

My brothers and I are knee-deep into our dream: putting together our Kickstarter rewards, securing locations, and filling the final remaining roles in the cast. We begin filming later this month.

And ever-present, I hear that voice whisper inside: “You’re a fake! Why waste your time with this? You’re going to fail!”

In my weaker moments, I wish I could somehow eliminate it completely. But I know all too well how resistance never goes away.

Knowing I will never completely be free of the fear and doubt, I choose to use them as a signpost. When I hear that whisper of doubt, when I sense the prickle of fear climb up my spine, I know I’m on the right track, chasing a dream.

But, in reality, it’s not just love – it’s money, it’s friends, it’s the education, it’s the surprises and it’s the weird life turns. That’s why I do my best not to think about what I deserve. Rather, life is better lived leaving it at wanting what you want and accepting what you get.

Forget what you deserve, what you think you deserve, or what anyone else thinks you deserve. If we would first stop limiting ourselves and refusing what other people or life offers us, then we could finally start being constantly amazed with life.

Stay Positive & Who Doesn’t Love Being Amazed

Garth E. Beyer

1. Very few dance with it or merely walk calmly forward. Few carry on when fear is pulling them back. That means that if you were to go forward with every fear imaginable (all fear is imagined), then you have an instant advantage without doing any of the easy work. Yes, dealing with fear is the hard work, actually making/doing whatever it is you’re passionate about is easy. Haven’t you walked into an art gallery and seen paintings that you know you could replicate? Making art is easy, but shipping it, putting it on the wall, giving it away, selling it – that’s the hard stuff. And fear is with you every step of the way.

2. Shame on you for enabling others to let fear control them. For saying it’s okay that they don’t give their work away, or suggesting they keep working on something until it’s better instead of showing it as it is. After all, the only way they will get better is if they show it and get feedback… from more people than just you. Yes, fear is what walks between you and your friend with its arms around both of your shoulders. Fear is tactful at making you as nervous as the person doing their work. That’s why you have as much responsibility to push others forward as they have to push themselves. Fear is about tough love and tough love will out.

Stay Positive & Keep On Keeping On

Garth E. Beyer

9 to 5 entails monotony, redundancy, and banality. It’s rarely valuable, in earnings or in personal benefits. 9 to 5 signifies structure. There is no room for creativity. Clock in. Clock out.

The beautiful jobstyles are the 5 to 9 ones. The ones that you’re a part of throughout the day. They are more lifestyles than anything else. There’s no clocking in or out, there’s only waking up and going to sleep.

5 to 9 entails connecting, giving, producing, sharing, creating, being passionate, showing sincerity, and being you. Payment is partially in dollar amounts, but more often it’s in happiness, in that feeling when you do a good deed without the person knowing it was you.

This generation is changing the hours, the jobstyles, and what work really means.

Stay Positive & More Power To You

Garth E. Beyer

Rarely because emotions are the effervescence of your pursuit. It’s not the way you painted the portrait that an observers falls in love with, it’s the emotion that they can see was put into it.

On the other side of the spectrum, you can’t numb the negative emotions of vulnerability, of being rejected, of getting criticism that you couldn’t handle. And that’s okay.

The way I see it is this: falling down doesn’t cease the pain.

The only options you have are to either keep creating art despite how much it may hurt or to find a new way to make better art by leveraging your emotions. You may not be able to numb them, but you can always leverage them.

Stay Positive & Lean Into Discomfort

Garth E. Beyer

Edward R. Murrow called stage fright ‘the sweat of perfection.’

What Murrow was implying is that getting yourself up there, just doing it, trying, testing, shipping, making yourself vulnerable, opening yourself to criticism, sharing what you have created is what makes perfection.

You can build a myriad of matryoshka dolls but they will never be perfect unless you share them, because that’s what creating is really about.

Perfection is a state of completeness and nothing is complete until it’s given away.

Stay Positive & Perspire Perfection

Garth E. Beyer

2. Produce: Try. Create. Make. Experiment. Fail. Produce something as often as possible. Choose not to have a choice if you construct something each day, just do it. Your goal is 10,000 hours or 10,000 lightbulbs, whichever comes first.

3. Share: Ship with style, deliver relentlessly. To share is equal amounts act of giving and feeling vulnerable. Don’t think about waiting. Tell yourself the best time to ship is now, and it will be. Whether you think you have something that matters doesn’t really matter. Someone, somewhere believes it matters. Will they find you?

Stay Positive & Consume Feedback Then Repeat

Garth E. Beyer

Too often I have seen people judge their work by whether they get an encore.

What about the regular applause? Is that not good enough?

No. It’s not.

Because no one makes themselves vulnerable for applause, they make themselves vulnerable because they want to do it again. And since sooner is better, the best is when they get an encore.

Stay Positive & Truly, Every Moment Is Your Encore

Garth E. Beyer

“Go against the current and you’ll look like a fool, but you’ll be stronger in the end.”

Stay Positive & Change The Tide

Garth E. Beyer