Work Energy

by Jim Harmer

  •Write a book that sells 2,000 copies

  •Save someone’s life

  •Be a millionaire

  •Earn a doctorate-level degree

  •Learn to speak a second language fluently

  I was in law school earning a Juris Doctorate degree so I could mark off the doctorate-level degree. I had just written an ebook that sold over 2,000 copies. It was incredible how simply writing down that list and dreaming as a teenager effectively charted a course for my life without even realizing its effect. I had entirely forgotten about my bucket list, but because those goals had been dreamed somewhere in the back of my mind, I went after them as natural life opportunities arose. Goals are valuable, whether or not they are the type of goal you mark off days on a calendar to achieve.

  Action Step Three: Summon Your Dreaming Juices

  Now it’s your turn to dream about what you would like to achieve and who you would like to be in the future. Think broadly about your life as a whole rather than narrowing your focus to one specific short-term goal.

  Write Down Your Dream

  Do not think of the steps you would have to take to accomplish them, or whether you think you can get them done. This isn’t a to-do list. This is simply a dream. Be specific about your goals. Some of them can be stupid like reading a dictionary cover-to-cover, and others should shape who you become, like having a family.

  So write it down. What would you like to achieve? Dream like a 15-year-old who has no concept of logistics. The question is not how, but what.

  Some people struggle to dream because their minds immediately jump to the difficulties in achieving the goal and a determination of how practical the goal is. If this is you, I’ll share one piece of advice from someone who has learned to dream big:

  Let your dreams breathe for one minute.

  Everyone is creative and wants to achieve things, but most people are too practical to allow those ideas to survive their scrutiny. Simply write down things you would like to be or do. Later you’ll learn a framework to make the logistics the simplest part of the process.

  What experiences like I had on Christmas Eve have you also had but haven’t yet been able to realize? Retire early? Love your job again? Get promoted? Earn your bonus at the end of this year? Get married? Develop a relationship with God? Summon your dreaming juices.

  You won’t be asked to make a goal like we’re all taught in school. It doesn’t have to be specific, measurable, time bound, etc. It may be, but it doesn’t have to be. Just like my bucket list with no end-date except the end of my life, some goals can be very effective without locking you into a specific schedule. Other goals, like achieving a sales target, do need specific requirements to hold your feet to the fire.

  While most people can quickly identify things they have dreamed in their future, others struggle to have such a clear vision. If that is the case, I’d encourage you to make a full bucket list of 50 things to do in life. It has served me well in clarifying in my mind where I want to go. Look up others’ bucket lists online and get inspired. Talk to your family and friends and ask them what they want to do. Dream a future.

  Here’s your chance to become something that you aren’t today. Here’s your chance to go somewhere or do something you’ve never done before. What is it?

  “The only thing standing between you and everything you’ve ever wanted to do in life—is doing it.”

  —Casey Neistat

  Once I dreamed the thought of running my business full-time, I couldn’t put it away. And I needed to turn my attention to the logistics of how I would achieve it. What if, after all this hard work, sacrifice, and struggle—not to mention $90,000 in student loan debt—I didn’t actually practice law? How could I tell my wife that?

  I’ve never been able to keep anything from Emily. Even when I have a surprise for her, I end up spilling the beans every time. Two weeks before her birthday, we’ll be driving down the road and “I got you a beautiful new bracelet!” will just pop out of my mouth. It’s an illness. I guess there were those times when I told her we were going to a restaurant and the kids and I surprised her by taking her to the airport for a secret vacation, but that was only after many years of not being able to keep a thing from her. I’m better at keeping secrets from my wife now. Don’t tell her.

  Even when we were dating, I had the “spill everything to Emily” illness. We had only been on two dates before it hit me that I’d like to marry her someday. Any normal person would keep that to themselves for a long time, but precisely seven days after our first kiss, I proposed. Seven weeks later, we were married.

  We have been through a lot together, but this was a bigger test for our marriage than we’d faced before. How do you wake up one morning, roll over to talk to your spouse, and say, “Uh … schmoopsie poo? Remember how we spent $90,000 on law school, and you scrimped and sacrificed, taking care of our two little babies full time and keeping the house while I basically lived at the law library on a ruined wingback blue chair over the last three years to become a lawyer? You remember that? And do you remember how we were going to have my income as an attorney and the income from my blog to support us to change all of that? Well, I was thinking about trading in my suit and tie for some sweats and a T-shirt so I can lounge around at home all day and blog from my laptop.”

  I don’t know how that would go in most marriages, but here’s how it went in mine. As soon as I said it, Emily responded, “I know it seems crazy, but I think you can do it, Jim! I’ve been wondering if you should go for it, and now that you’re bringing it up too, I think that means you should.”

  All it took to begin the momentum toward my goal was taking that very first step of removing the distraction of my job as an attorney. I turned down the job I’d been offered and prepared to go a different direction. There would never be a salary or pension in my future, or a boss to simply tell me what to do each day. We were going rogue. We decided to take the future into our own hands and see how far we could take the opportunity.

  There’s something you want to accomplish, too. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have bought this book. Would you like to have boundless energy to spend every day teaching your kids as a stay-at-home mom? What country do you want to travel to? What social issue would you love to work on? Would you like to do something in politics? Write a book? Climb a mountain? Run a marathon? Learn Spanish? Every person alive has something in their mind they’d like to do or accomplish.

  I learned how you can accomplish those goals in Brazil.

  I lived in Brazil for two years as a missionary. One day, I went to visit a man named Marcos in a rural community outside Itù. My companion and I had been to his house a number of times, and I noticed a small stack of 15-20 bricks behind Marcos’s house. The next time we visited, I noticed the bricks were arranged differently and there were a few more. Again, on a third visit, I thought the stack seemed slightly larger. Eventually, I asked him jokingly if he was starting a collection.

  He answered, “Someday, we will have children, and I’m going to have enough bricks to make a room for them.”

  I asked him when he was going to pick up the rest of the bricks and he responded, “I don’t really know when I’ll have enough bricks. Every time I have a little extra money, I buy a few more bricks and carry them home.” That attitude taught me something about achieving big goals:

  All big goals are achieved by small starting steps.

  Contrast Marcos’s attitude to a painter I met not long ago. He was lamenting to me that he was having a difficult time finding enough jobs painting houses. His business wasn’t doing well, and it was stressful for him. He even said he wasn’t sure if painting houses was the future he’d like to have. Remembering the hidden blessing I found while working at the dollar store of being able to listen to podcasts, I suggested that the painter use his many quiet work hours to learn skills that could improve his situation. He could not have been less interested in my suggestion. He just looked at me with an expression of som
eone who had just watched Star Trek and baseball for a few hours.

  I wish I could personally sit down with you and talk about your bucket list, and how you could accomplish it. I wish I could work on them with you and bust them out together. I wish I could come to your house and sit in your living room and drink a root beer with you, but that would be strange. I digress.

  Let’s keep this simple. Imagine I’m sitting in front of you, talking with you face to face. You tell me the goal you’ve dreamed, and I tell you this: “Prove it. You want it so bad? I dare you to just take one step.”

  People can dream all they want, but the vast majority of people will dream the rest of their lives away. Do you have a goal and you really mean it? I dare you to actually do one tiny thing about it today.

  Want a bigger house? Go spend $5 on a brick.

  Want to lose weight? I dare you to eat only a small salad for dinner tonight. Just tonight. One time.

  Want to be a better dad? I dare you to take your kid camping this weekend, even if you’ve never done it before.

  Want to get a college degree? I dare you to request your high school transcript.

  Want to go to New Zealand? I dare you to sell something from your garage on Craigslist and put the money in your savings account.

  You won’t, though. At least, statistically, you won’t. According to the University of Scranton, 81% of people are unable to maintain their New Year’s resolution goals long term (Vangarelli and Norcross, “The resolution solution: longitudinal examination of New Year’s change attempts”: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223679624_The_resolution_solution_Longitudinal_examination_of_New_Year’s_change_attempts).

  Very few people actually do anything about their goals. We just like to dream of a time when we might achieve in the future, and regret that we didn’t achieve in the past. If you don’t harness your work energy, you’ll be a lazy lump of lard who won’t achieve your goal because it’s “too hard.”

  Yes, I’m trying to provoke you. No, I don’t actually know if you are in fact a lazy lump of lard. I want to poke the bear. If you care at all about bettering your situation, I dare you to take the tiniest, simplest, easiest step toward your goal today.

  Three years ago, I told my wife I wanted to learn the guitar. One of the things on my bucket list is to play “Time of Your Life” on the guitar. Why did I pick the most cliché song ever to learn on the guitar? Because I’m a cliché kind of guy, okay? Give me some slack. My wife researched and researched and bought me a beautiful guitar. On Christmas morning, I excitedly opened the gift wrapped in the peculiar shape of a guitar case. I was thrilled to see the tool I’d use to knock another item off my list. I tuned it up and printed off the chords to “Time of Your Life” by Green Day as well as fingering diagrams for each of the most common chords. That guitar case has not been opened a single time in the ensuing three years. I kid you not. I can be a lazy lump of lard too, if I don’t intentionally fight against it.

  So when I say you’re a lazy lump of lard, I’m not throwing stones. I’m calling you a human being, and human beings are simply not good at daring to take the first step toward dreams. We almost always lean toward the comfort of doing what we have always done.

  Here’s why I feel so adamantly that you must take some kind of step today before you go to sleep. I’ll explain it with a story.

  A few years ago, a friend of mine came to my house and asked for help. He was struggling financially and wanted to learn how to create an income online. I had the perfect opportunity for him. I owned a website about baseball that I had purchased as an investment. The site had decent traffic already. As you’ve gathered from my writings thus far, I do not like baseball. This friend loved it. I offered that he could write blog posts about baseball on the site and better monetize the solid traffic the site was getting. I’d give him everything the site earned after the amount it was already earning. It was an incredible opportunity for him. I had a site with a great start and decent traffic, it was on a topic he was familiar with, and I’d be mentoring him through every step of the process. I spent several hours showing him exactly what he needed to do, and he left my house extremely excited to get going and for what this opportunity meant for him.

  Two years later, I logged back into the baseball site. Guess what? He never once wrote a single article, never touched the site, never made any improvements, and the site had died out.

  Humans are experts at freezing up and choking at the moment when we need to swing for the fences. We all do it.

  That wasn’t the only time this had happened. After I successfully built my business, I had over a dozen friends and family members come to my kitchen table and pour their hearts out about how desperately they wanted to start an online business making content. Each time they left with a clear tutorial on what to do and my offer to spend as much time with them as they needed. Seriously, this happened at least a dozen times or more. Each time they’d assure me they’d be the exception who would immediately get to work on the opportunity. There were a few who did and fizzled out in a month or less, but most of them never even took step one.

  I should add at this point that I am also a lazy lump of lard. Yes, I took the opportunity to start a business, but do you know how many times I’ve been “sooo incredibly committed to start a diet today!”? It’s embarrassing. Trust me, I’m a lazy lump of lard just like you are. Given the right circumstances, we’re all lards. Boy, I hope that the last sentence isn’t the one line from this book that gets quoted in reviews.

  Action Step Four: Take One Step Toward the Goal You Want

  Few readers of this book will suddenly shift careers or suddenly quit their job to blog in their pajamas. Please don’t do that. It sounds like a terrible idea.

  Yet every reader can buy a brick today, so to speak. Update your resume for your dream job that matches your work energy and just stick it on Monster.com. What do you have to lose? Open a note on your iPhone and write a plan for losing weight that matches your work energy. Go out and play with your kids by doing something you’d really enjoy, rather than being a martyr and following your kids around the local trampoline park like a zombie.

  Want to travel the world but have no money? Go put $5 in your savings account right this second. Want to start an online business? Go buy your .com right now and tell yourself that someday you’re going to write on it.

  It doesn’t matter how desperate you feel you are, or how badly you want to achieve your goal. It doesn’t matter how resolute you feel now or how big you dream. The truth is you’re about to choke big time. Yes, I’m provoking you again. I dare you to just take one step forward toward your goal and prove to me that you’re the exception. Do it today. Something concrete, something today. Go buy your brick.

  Just go buy a single brick. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have the blueprints for the whole house yet. You’re going to need a brick, so every brick is one brick closer.

  And if you don’t buy the brick, you might be a lump of lard—but keep coming back to your goal and try again. Keep thinking about it and dream about how your life could change. What do you have to lose? A brick?

  “When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life. But standing here among the people of Punxsutawney and basking in the warmth of their hearths and hearts, I couldn’t imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter.”

  —Bill Murray in Groundhog Day

  I had a clear goal to reach financial security for my family by building my online business full time, and I’d taken the first initial step by turning down a job as an attorney so I could focus on that goal. Now the work of growing and scaling that business was in front of me.

  One of the first things I did was to hire an employee. I had started to become addicted to business books and podcasts, and I kept hearing that if I wanted to build a “real” company, I needed to “work on the business and not in the bus
iness.” I read the book The E-Myth (Gerber, Michael E., The E-Myth: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, HarperBusiness, 1986) and was putting it into practice religiously.

  I went back to my alma mater—Brigham Young University-Idaho—and asked a well-respected professor for some advice on who I might find to help me with my website business. I hired a guy named Dustin almost on the spot because, frankly, I didn’t know who else I’d get.

  Dustin helped to manage the students in the online photography course so I could be sure their needs were being met. He was a diligent worker and someone I could generally rely on.

  I graduated from law school in the spring and invited Dustin to come on full time when he finished school. It was a real company, and the revenue continued its ascent month after month.

  I began looking for office space to run the company—because a real company needs a real office, I reasoned. I wanted somewhere that could function as both a full-fledged photography studio with high ceilings and an office. This way we could do video tutorials in our studio space and computer work in our computer space.

  The building I rented was on historic Main Street in the little town of Caldwell, Idaho. The former bank building was over 100 years old. There are still four working vaults there with giant, two-foot-thick metal doors, which really gave the place character. I loved the old downtown location and the uniqueness of the building. I remember the meter reader coming over to turn on the power. It took him several hours to figure out which meter ran to our building because of the complicated nest of old wiring.

  As we continued building traffic on the website by writing articles and sharing things on Pinterest, the revenue continued to climb. Eventually, we started hitting $20,000 per month reliably, and sometimes far exceeded it. The expenses of the business were actually quite low with only one employee and an inexpensive old building, so we were beginning to bring in a handsome profit.