Choose to Succeed at Living Your Dream

If we can all be successful, have abundant wealth, and create and live our dreams, why do some of us achieve it and others don’t? Besides, we all want the same things, don’t we?

I have yet to meet a person who has said that they don’t want to be successful, they don’t want to have a lot of money in their bank account, they don’t want to be in a satisfying and meaningful relationship, they don't want to be healthy, they don’t want to realize their dreams. Knowing this, I think it makes the initial question even more compelling.

Try this on for size: wherever you are in life is exactly where you’ve chosen to be.

·         You’ve chosen to make the amount of money you make

·         You’ve chosen to weigh what you weigh

·         Your relationship is exactly where you’ve chosen it to be

Instead of realizing that we’ve chosen to be where we are or where we’re not, we adopt a victim mentality filled with reasons and excuses. Why? Because we just can’t deal with the ramifications of our choices.

When you take responsibility for your life, your life will change profoundly. Then, you own your life and nobody else gets the blame for why you are the way you are and why you have what you have or don’t have.

Here are a few character traits you might want to adopt to "up" your level of success, no matter how you define it:

1.    Integrity – your success in life depends upon your integrity. You simply must stop blaming everyone else for things going on in your life, and in the world, and look at your own integrity.

2.    Attitude – you must have a positive, optimistic attitude. From the Latin root “opt” (choose), optimism is about choosing to be positive, choosing to see the world in a better way.

3.    Giving – you have to be more interested in giving to others than in what you can get for yourself. In other words, consider other people’s interests more important than your own.

The choice to succeed (or not) lies squarely with you, a choice that simply cannot be overlooked when you consider that two-billion people live in a part of the world where they cannot live their dreams -- they don’t get to choose.

In these United States, the freedom to create and to live our dreams is a high-priced gift given to all of us, one that we often fail to recognize. And what better time to acknowledge and appreciate that gift than this Memorial Day weekend when we honor and celebrate those who have paid that price. 

Here's another way you can honor and appreciate them, not just one day or one weekend out of the year, but every day of your life: choose to succeed at living your dream.