The Comfort of Change
by Anna Sabino, author, Your Creative Career
“Do anything but let it produce joy.” — Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
You’ve been feeling the need to change for a while now. You know there are options, but you don’t dare to explore them. Working days pass, filled to the brim with tasks — you hardly have the time to catch a breath. You feel the urge of checking things off the list. You focus on the tasks that have immediate or past-due deadlines, which will provide instant gratification. At nights, you try to socialize, meet your friends, date. When the weekend comes, you need to rejuvenate; you’re so tired that you need at least half a day to do absolutely nothing, then run errands, do some more socializing maybe or working out, having neglected it during the week. And once again, you’re not excited to start another week. On Sunday night, your stomach hurts, but you accept it because you know a lot of people experience it. Then the next day, there’s the “I hate Mondays” feeling.
Again, you know that most people you know feel the same week after week. We’re caught in the daily minutia and our long-term plans suffer. Our big plans have no deadline, so we don’t feel the pressure forcing us to accomplish them. Our dreams suffer, there’s never enough time to devote to them as we’re playing a constant catch up with our daily, more immediate things.
You may only see the devoted and depressed people with day jobs in your circles. You may feel that you have to continue the rat race like everyone else you see. You move like a bee from morning to evening, accomplishing one project after the next, being pushed by the deadlines which are always too close or past due. Then your 1.5 free hours after work are spent on squeezing in some social time, a meal, or resting with brainless TV because you’re absolutely exhausted. You’re too tired to think about making changes and feel demotivated by your colleagues, who play the work game daily. Starting a business would make you feel like a person ready to start a revolution, a nonconformist. But there are half a million people in the United States alone that you don’t notice, who decided to start their private revolution, start a business. Over 550,000 new businesses are started every month in the United States alone.
Dreaming vs. Living Your Dream
We keep dreaming our dreams, planning, speculating, deep in our thoughts of “what if.” It feels so comforting to think that one day our dreams will not be dreams. We dream our dreams, thinking that their execution should take time. We think we need to be ready for it. Dreams usually mean changes, and because changes are tough, we need to prepare for them. We need more time, more experience, and more money. We analyze those who are already living our dream and this only reassures us that we need to wait. We don’t have the experience, connections, and money they do.
Knowing that changes are uncomfortable and risky makes us continue what we’re doing and staying dissatisfied with our predictable status quo. Where we are is comfortable and safe, so we choose not to choose and keep dreaming.
We may get pushed by the discomfort to take the necessary steps to stop dreaming and start living our dream. We decide to take a leap, quit, embark on a new journey. We say we’re jumping in feet first and our friends ask us if we’re sure that we should make such a rushed decision. In reality, this decision is not rushed. We have been dreaming this dream for years, and because we were pushed beyond our limits, we decided to go for it.
This path may be a great solution, but it’s not a safe one. Whenever you hear that entrepreneurs are risk-takers, it does hold true, but their risks are very calculated minimizing the loss.
It’s not a good idea to wait until we’re pushed over our limits to decide to make a change. Such decisions should be taken and executed methodically. It’s important to take the first step toward your dream as soon as the transition idea comes to your mind. In doing so, you will have plenty of time to try things out, experiment, and make changes. We may realize that dreaming our dream is great, but living it is letting us down. All these realizations are important steps toward creating the life we want. Don’t think that having spent time on developing what we thought was a dream career is wasteful. Sometimes discovering what we don’t want to do is a necessary step in designing the life we want.
Adapted, and reprinted with permission from Career Press, an imprint of Red Wheel/Weiser LLC, Your Creative Career by Anna Sabino is available wherever books and ebooks are sold or directly from the publisher at www.redwheelweiser.com or 800–423–7087.
Anna Sabino is the designer behind the jewelry brand Lucid New York, which she started after leaving her Wall Street career. Her jewelry collections are sold in more than 100 stores all over the world and have been featured in People StyleWatch, Vogue, and Cosmopolitan. Sabino is a contributor to HuffPost and Medium and is a certified career coach. She speaks and leads workshops focusing on growing your creative business, generating multiple streams of income, and working remotely. You can find valuable business advice at AnnaSabino.com.
