Entrepreneurship Your Dream? Stop Fantasizing And Start Doing!

REPRINTED FROM AFRIQUE NEWSMAGAZINE - 1993

Column: "Employ Yourself" - Written By Pierre Clark. Copyright 1993-2006. All Rights Reserved.

Part 1: A Dream Without A Plan Is Just A Fantasy.(tm)

Most you know our signature saying at S.E.L.F., Inc. is "a dream without a plan is just a fantasy(tm)." This saying grew out of our esperience with hundreds of people who say they dream of success in their own businesses. However, we've learned that most people's hopes never progress beyond the daydreaming stage. Why? It's found that fear and a tendency to cling to familiar yet unfulfilling ways of living are crutches people lean on, sabotaging their own ambitions.

Previously, we've talked about practical methods of starting your own business. Yet there are many of you who still refuse to believe in your ability to put these simple methods to work.

The Capacity To Dream

The capacity to dream, to visualize an alternative reality, is a talent unique to man. Dreams, it has been said, are where ideas and desires begin and man has always been driven by them. Our awareness and evaluation of who and where we are and the perceived shortcomings of our current lifestyles, compel us to dream about being more, achieving more, being in better positions than we perceive we are at the moment.

We live our lives by the saying, "the grass is always greener on the other side," as so many of us wish we were somewhere else, doing something else or living a life we perceive to be more fulfilling and successful.

Nonetheless, most of us still live in dungeons of unrealized aspirations and frustrations, paralyzed into inaction by fears and doubts about our capacity to change our lives.

So we continue to do what we have always done, living our lives in the old comfortable, familiar patterns. We succumb to our own insecurities. We allow the skepticism of friends and family to crush our ambitions, because so many of us measure our own self-worth by what other people think of us. We succumb to the pressure to conform to the common denominator at which everyone else exists because it's easier, even if we admit to ourselves that place is not really where we want to be.

If It Is To Be, It's Up To Me.

It is our own self-perception and indecision, then, that has determined where we are now, and the eventual course of our lives. If we refuse to take action to make our lives better, it's not someone else's fault, it's our own fault for allowing our insecurities to take control. As Rev. Robert Schuller often says, "If it is to be, it's up to me."