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The way to start doing something is to simply start doing something.
—Vernon Howard
After reading about all the benefits of drifting, you may be a little confused, but this book is about incorporating both inaction and action (drifting and not drifting) into your life. By not drifting, I mean taking action. And by taking action, I mean taking action in your life to do something different—to stop the drifting, or maybe taking action to drift. Whatever action you take, the key is doing something. Something different, because you know that what you are currently doing is not working.
Let’s say you took the advice from the last chapter, drifted more than you ever have, and a revelation came to you. The revelation doesn’t have to be something that has never been invented before. It could be an idea for a book, an aspiration to be a dancer, perhaps a determination to chase your dream of being a professional athlete. It might mean taking your dream vacation, or becoming a writer or a musician. It could be the next big idea for a business, an invention, a painting. Whatever it is that got you excited, that got your adrenaline pumping, that made you excited about life again, it’s still just an idea. You can talk about it all you want, to your friends, family, or whoever will listen, but until you do something, it is only an idea.
Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace, and power in it.22
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Now is when the “or not to drift” comes into play. It’s time to take action and go after your dreams. This is when I would go to the monk who had been meditating in the cave for several years and tell him to come out of the cave and share his wisdom and insight with the rest of the world. You have what you feel is the greatest idea since bottled water, but until you take action, it will be buried in the eternal tomb that is home to an infinite number of great ideas that are all too soon forgotten. How many inventions, scientific theories, businesses, paintings, books, athletes are buried in this tomb? Just think of all the potential wealth that exists there! How many times have you heard your friends and family tell you about an idea for a new product that is badly needed, but that’s the last time you ever hear about it? Yeah, it was a great idea, but that’s all it was: an idea. Another idea come and gone. Off to the tomb.
Your soul knows when you are living in conflict (in body or mind) and are not pursuing your higher good. Your soul will do something, (eventually anything) to wake you up and get you back “on track.” It usually starts with soft, gentle whispers, “Psst… wake up, Dear One. It’s time to alter or release the bad dream you’ve been having (or living) and wake-up to A New Life.” Of course if that doesn’t work, the soul may say, “Hey You! Get up and move your ass, and don’t look back!” 23
—Michael Mirdad
Basically, everything that you see was at one time just an idea, a thought, nothing more. Cars, planes, shoes, paintings, businesses, sculptures, pencils, chairs, iPhones, iPads, the wheel, books—just an idea in someone’s mind, until they took action. The hardest and toughest question you have is knowing when to take action. How do you know your idea has merit and it’s not just another crazy dream? How do you know when to change jobs, get a job, move to a new city or live in the country, go back to college, or get your high-school diploma? How do you know? Unfortunately, I don’t have a magical answer for you, but I can tell you about my experience with taking action.
There is an infinite distance between the wishers and the doers. 24
—Orison Swett Marden
As you will read in chapter 3, “My Story/My Drifting,” when I had my big idea, my eureka moment, my life calling, my epiphany, or whatever you might call it—if I had done nothing, had not taken action, well, who knows what I might be doing now? I hate to even entertain the thought. Maybe I would be a poor and starving writer!
You have to ask yourself, is it time to stop drifting and take action? Is it time to make your idea a reality? Do you want to go for it and see what happens, or do you want to be like one of those who Henry David Thoreau says “go to the grave with the song still in them?”25 As I mentioned previously, you may be perfectly content and happy with your life, your accomplishments, and your career, which is great! But if there is something inside you that is telling you that you don’t want to go to your grave with your song still in you, that you have much more that you want to bring out, then the concepts and ideas in this book will help you.
Only you know if your life is just a half or a quarter of what it should or could be. In his book He Can Who Thinks He Can, Orison Swett Marden quotes author and clergyman Phillips Brooks as saying, “No man can live a half-life when he has genuinely learned that it is a half-life.”26 Is your life a half-life? Do you still have your song in you? Are you tired of your same old routine? Living life like it was one big yesterday? If you answer even a partial yes to any of these questions, it may be time for you to take action. Time to change what you are currently doing, take the plunge, and go for it. You might be amazed at all the doors that will open for you.
In the introduction to this book, I mentioned a quote from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus: “Every walking animal is driven to its purpose with a whack.”27 Are you ready for your whack? Are you ready to be driven to a greater purpose? Are you ready to find your true calling—what you were meant to be and do? Although the previous chapter talked about the need for drifting, the need to back off, the need to slow down, to be still and open your mind to the universal intelligence, there comes a point where if you ever want to bring about your greatest aspirations, you have to take action.
Newton would just be a man getting hit by an apple if he had not developed his theory of gravity from the event. His mind was still and open to ideas at the time when his revelation came to him, but he did not continue to drift under the apple tree. He took action. He understood our inherent need to drift and our inherent need to express something greater in ourselves by taking action. It’s inherent in all of us, not just Newton.
The process of rising from your present concept of yourself to a higher concept of yourself is the means of all true progress. 28
—Neville Goddard
There is a time and place for taking action, and only you will know. There will be something in your gut that keeps gnawing at you, and the more you try to ignore it, the more it grows. It’s like writing this book: it gnaws at me every day that I don’t write. Don’t ignore that feeling. It’s telling you something.
You can’t cross the sea by merely staring at the water.29
— Rabindranath Tagore
Aren’t you tired of staring at the sea? Running to the mailbox every day to see if there is something new and exciting in the mail that is going to change your life? Putting your dream off until tomorrow? And then tomorrow and then tomorrow… but tomorrow never comes.
I am not telling you to quit your job and drop everything. When I started the business I own now, I continued to work at various odd jobs. They weren’t glamorous jobs. I had an engineering degree, and I was getting minimum wage on the other end of a shovel putting in a pipeline and also putting treadmills together on an assembly line. Nothing wrong with these jobs, but it certainly wasn’t my life calling. I also wasn’t crazy enough to put all my eggs in one basket. I would not have survived without these jobs (and my wife working as well).
Even though I worked hard at all these various jobs, my heart and soul were a million miles away dwelling on what would become TR Toppers, the business I currently own and run with my two brothers. The other jobs were just a way for me to get my dream off the ground. The various odd jobs I had were tolerable because I knew that they were only temporary, that I wouldn’t be there until retirement. I didn’t care that I was in my mid-thirties with a college degree working labor jobs, because I had a dream. I had something greater in me that I wanted to express. And I knew I had to take action. At the time, I hadn’t read any of the books I’m quoting here, but I knew it was time to pursue my dream. As you will read, I just started chopping, one box at a time.
I wonder if he hopes to see the man I might have been. 30
—Thomas Samuel Jones Jr.
I want to emphasize again that it’s not an all-or-nothing deal, when and if you do take action. You will still need your drifting periods, your time alone to get away. I strongly encourage it on a daily basis.
There is a bird that lives deep in the snowy mountain. Tortured by night’s numbing cold, it cries that it will build a warm nest in the morning. Yet, when day breaks, it sleeps the day away, basking in the warmth of the sun. So it continues crying vainly throughout its life. People are often the same, lamenting their circumstances yet passing by every opportunity to change. 31
—Taro Gold
Most of us tend to live like this bird. We torture ourselves on a daily basis because we know we are putting off what lies deep within us. The section of chapter 11 entitled “Don’t Be the ‘Usual You’” addresses just this problem. It’s too easy to be the “usual you.” If you don’t know what your “usual you” is, then you should probably go to that section now. Most of you, however, probably know the “usual you” that I am talking about.
It is hard to change. It’s hard to change the things we do day in and day out, month to month, year to year. But the good news is: you can change.
“If things would only change!” you cry. What is it that changes things? Wishing, or hustling?—dreaming, or working? Can you expect them to change while you merely sit down and wish them to change? How long would it take you to build a house sitting on the foundation and wishing it would go up? Wishing does not amount to anything unless it is backed up by endeavor, determination, and grit. 32
—Orison Swett Marden
Is it time for you to take action? Or is it a time to drift? Only you can make that decision, but most likely you have a good idea which direction you need to go.
There comes an hour of sadness with the setting of the sun, not for the sins committed but for the things I have not done. 33
—Minot Judson Savage
This is your big moment. This moment is eternity. Now is the time to make something of your life. To be proud of yourself, not someone else. To free yourself. To be what you can be. I don’t care what age you are—it doesn’t matter. People use age as an excuse. Too young, too old, too whatever… and I might throw in, maybe, too scared. Whatever your excuse is, forget it. Why not during this lifetime be great? Why wait until the next one?
To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.34
—Robert Louis Stevenson