Dream Big Dreams — No Dream is Too Big

By larrybuckley | Published: February 14, 2013

DREAM BIG DREAMS — NO DREAM IS TOO BIG

Do you dream big dreams? Do you even have the ability or the desire to do so? If you did dream big dreams, would they just be dreams or would you try to find a way to make those dreams come true? A wise man once said, “If you are going to dream, you might as well dream big!” The logical next question is…”Why should you dream at all?”

We are going to explore that question in this article. To dream big dreams may mean something different to you than it does to someone else. The definition will be different for different people. This blog is only interested in YOUR journey to the end of YOUR own personal rainbow.

It is hard to dream big dreams in the midst of day to day drudgery.

Tote that barge, Lift that bale.

I said I would teach you how to dream effectively and you may have been asking yourself, “How can dreaming ever be effective? Mama always told me to get my head out of the clouds and we all know Mama is always right.” Right? “Tote that barge, lift that bale.” Life’s a drag. And that’s just the way it is.

So why do some people “pull themselves up by the bootstraps”? Luck? Maybe. God blessed them with more intelligence than most of us have? Maybe. Or maybe something deep down inside of them just stood up one day and said, “It’s not acceptable anymore for my life to be a drag. God did NOT make an imperfect person. He gave me everything I need. And it might just be a SIN if I don’t use what God gave me. The potential for my life is staggering and I WILL NOT waste another minute of the time God has given me to lead a meaningful and exciting life.”

If you dream big dreams and have no focus, the dreaming is futile.

Dreaming without Focus is just Daydreaming.

I personally have always been a good dreamer. When I was in the fifth grade, my teacher actually sent a note home saying I daydreamed too much. That’s bad. Right? Not necessarily. If by daydreaming, she meant that I lacked focus, then that could be bad. But if she meant that I had my head stuck in the clouds, then I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. The problem I had then was that I DID lack focus AND my head WAS stuck in the clouds. And when you dream big dreams but fail to stay constantly focused on the prize that those dreams represent, then it is impossible to make your dreams become reality. But the flip side is that if you dream dreams and can learn how to focus your mental, emotional, and physical capacities toward making those dreams come true, you can truly climb mountain peaks that are now impossible to even see. I want to teach you how to focus your heart, mind, and soul, not to mention your blood, sweat, and tears, on the future…not just any future…but the future as YOU wish it to be.

Almost all of us are dreamers – or we have been at one time or another in our past. We have dreamed big dreams and believed in an unlimited future. If we have stopped dreaming, it is because we have allowed ourselves to be conditioned by the opinions of others or because a failure to succeed at some personal or business venture(s) in the past has convinced us that dreaming is futile. So we have developed the self-limiting habit of measuring the potential of the future with the yardstick of the present. We are so busy worrying about the way things are now, or worse, how they might have been, that we fail to see what the world could be like if we dreamed dreams and diligently pursued them.

There is a famous quote that you may have heard, “Some men see the world as it is…and ask ‘Why?’ Other men see the world as it could be…and ask…‘Why not?”

FOCUS ON GOALS

Some of us don’t dream dreams because we think dreaming is too impractical. Pipe dreams, we call them. And if we dream big dreams then they are just bigger pipe dreams, even more impossible to reach. Did you ever stop to wonder why some people win Olympic gold medals while other people want to run but never enter a race? Some people make millions of dollars and others who seem to have just as much talent do nothing but look at the millionaires with envy. And wonder why. Well, ok. Why? Is it luck? Maybe. But when analyzed more closely, we can usually find a couple of common traits in successful people that play a much larger role in their success than does luck. The first is attitude. And the second is focus. Attitude has two parts. Belief and desire are two prerequisites to success that can be lumped together to form the psychological phenomenon called attitude. The proper attitude is essential. But let’s add a new element – focus. And the right attitude CAN LEAD to focus. Do you agree that staying focused on the goal is absolutely essential to your success? There is a phrase that represents the point very clearly. It was a phrase used during the American Civil Rights movement to remind people of the the desired end result for a cause for which people were willing to put their lives on the line. They succeeded desegregating a country but gave the whole world hope and belief that the impossible can be accomplished. And their motto should be an inspiration in any endeavor. I have tried to fit it permanently into my thinking. The saying is…

“Keep Your Eyes On The Prize!”

Dream big dreams but focus with the end in mind.

Keep Your Eyes on the Prize!

We should all have this simple phrase written not only on our walls, but also in our hearts and minds. It seems such an easy thing to do. But keeping your eyes on the prize, the gold, the target, the end result, … your dream… can be a very difficult thing to do. FOCUS! So much FOCUS and BELIEF that you don’t even acknowledge the possibility that there are obstacles that cannot be overcome. You must have FOCUS! Remember, if you have enough “belief” and “desire”, you will have the right attitude. And with the right attitude, you can learn to stay focused. And with enough focus, you can indeed move whatever personal mountains you dream about moving, no matter how large they may be.

If you believe the concepts I have laid out in this article, then you have already taken the first step toward success. “Belief” is the first step in effective dreaming. You will never dream big dreams and achieve them if you don’t have a powerful and unshakable belief that you can do so. So if you believe, then you have passed the first test.

In the next few blog articles, I am going to give you principles that, if combined with action, can change your attitudes and focus your life. It all starts with your story… Uh oh. You didn’t know you had a story, did you? Well, if you don’t already, you will definitely have one by the time we are finished. If you thought you had a reason to succeed, you will now have the opportunity to make your little jingle of a “why” into a symphony of a “why”, with a huge orchestra and everything. My goal is to help you to identify what is really important in your life with such clarity and depth that you will finally be able to achieve the purpose and focus that will make your dreams become realities. You will then be better prepared for the slings and arrows that are called reality in your current world when you start on your journey to success. And then you will need to find a vehicle to get you there, if you don’t already have one.

Remember, God gave you all the human qualities you need to succeed. I can supply you with the tools you need to use those God-given qualities. The rest is up to you.

I WOULD LIKE TO GET YOUR OPINION

Let me know about your past successes or failures and whether what you have gotten from this blog so far has changed your thinking in any way or set you on a new path. Please leave a comment. I would like to hear from you. And if you would like to leave your name and email address at the top right corner of this page, I will also send you notification anytime I add a new article to the blog.

Posted in Dream Big Dreams | Tagged belief, desire, focus | 2 Responses

Keys to Success — Eight Steps in Your Journey

By larrybuckley | Published: February 1, 2013

KEYS TO SUCCESS — EIGHT STEPS IN YOUR JOURNEY

The keys to success will open the doors of opportunity. But along the way you will encounter multiple doors that must be opened to get to a single opportunity. So you will need multiple keys to success. It is up to you to succeed. Only you can do it. But success is a journey and as with any journey, you will need a roadmap. There are eight keys — checkpoints — that you will need in order to be successful.

There are multiple keys to success required to reach the gold at the rainbow's end.

At the end of the rainbow, you will find your dream.

1. Your Dream. The first of the keys to success is your dream. You must have a dream. And you need a burning desire to achieve that dream. Most dreams for most people never come to fruition. They are just dreams. Pipe dreams? Maybe. Or maybe the problem is the dreamer, not the dream. If you don’t want the dream badly enough, you will never have a chance to make it a reality. And sometimes the problem is the lack of a vehicle. If there is a dream and there is a dreamer who really will do whatever is necessary to become successful, the dreamer still needs a means of achievement, a vehicle.

2. Goals. Once you have the dream in your mind — I know, I know, it has been there most of your life, waiting to be released — once it’s there, you may find that it really is HUGE. Big as a DRAGON. Big as a MOUNTAIN even. And scary as your MOTHER-IN-LAW. Sorry. Please don’t tell her I said that. The dream may be so big and so far away that it gives you anxiety attacks to even contemplate trying to achieve it. And that is part of the problem with dreams. They are unreachable. Everyone says so. Right? So why do some people actually get to theirs? Because they have the second key to success, goals. They make their dreams practical by creating goals that can actually have action plans and can be broken down into smaller pieces so that the journey becomes a series of steps instead of one giant impossible leap. Goals.

One of the most crucial keys to success is having the right vehicle.

Wrong Jungle!

4. Vehicle. Oh, did I say there has to be an action plan? Stephen Covey wrote a story in his book 7 Habits of Highly Successful People that represents this well. There was a group of hard working men who were cutting their way through a jungle with machetes and their supervisors were trying to manage them well to make sure they were as efficient as possible so they could get through the jungle and reach their objective. Just like we would do to achieve our dreams and goals. Then one enterprising young worker climbed the highest tree in the jungle and looked around, then yelled, “WRONG JUNGLE'”. You want to make sure you have the right vehicle or you will get a lot of work done but will never reach your goals. Whether it is a storefront business, a sales organization, a network marketing company, or the next great internet idea, a huge key to success is the vehicle you use to get there. And it has to be the right one for you.

5. Leadership self-development. Number 5 and number 6 are related keys to success. They both have to do with your education. Don’t ever get so bogged down in the day to day grind that you neglect this key. It must be a continual part of your life. Learn your trade but also read books on attitude, leadership, and business and listen to CD’s, take continuing education courses. Never quit developing yourself. It will be an investment of money and time that will pay dividends many times over.

6. Expertise. This is akin to number 5 but has to do with your trade — your specific chosen business. Know your vehicle well. At first your survival will depend on it. If you recruit quality people in the future, you don’t have to be the best at every facet of your business — that’s why you recruit the best people you can find and lead them well — but you should have a respectable knowledge of every facet of the business. This is a leadership function and a control factor. It is hard to inspire your people or know whether they are doing a good job if you yourself don’t know how things are supposed to work. As your business gets really large, you may find it impossible to know how to do everything so you will have to find other imaginative ways to lead and control.

7. Back to dreams and goals. Even after you think you have succeeded, you will encounter new doors that will require new keys to success if you want to take your business to the next level. You will need to think about dreams and goals again. But now we call them vision. If you don’t know the really big picture of where you want your business to go, no one will want to follow you. So do strategic planning so that the vision is really clear in your mind.

You will have ongoing keys to success, like communication.

Communicate! Communicate! Communicate!

8. Communicate. Finally, the better you can communicate your vision, the more loyal to you and the vision your people will be. You might even want to let them participate in formulating the vision. You may want to then put it in writing and use it constantly. Another useful document for many businesses is a philosophy, also developed as a group, that everyone tries to live by. Communicate, communicate, communicate. And make your business a collective enterprise. The more your people are a part of the planning and the responsibility for the business, the more they will take ownership of it. This too, will pay huge dividends and suddenly you might find that those unreachable dreams have magically been reached. So I guess the next step will be to start dreaming bigger dreams.

It all sounds so simple. Right? Wrong. It will take a lot of hard work and your own imagination and leadership to make it work really well. But what I will give you will be a road map that will help you to make your dreams achievable. It does sound like a lot of work, right? Yeah. It is. But remember, those dreams are HUGE. It is not easy to find a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and there are leprechauns everywhere who are trying to stop you. May the luck of the Irish be with you on your road to success!

This is only an outline and a guide. I will get into detail on all eight keys to success later. But if I have left any out or if there is a specific concept about which you would like to learn more, please leave a comment. I would like to know what is on your mind.

I WOULD LIKE TO HEAR FROM YOU!

Let me know about your success or lack of it in the past and what you have gotten from this blog so far to set you on a new path. Please leave a comment. I would like to hear from you. And if you leave your contact information at the top right corner of this page, I will also send you notification anytime I add a new article to the blog.

Posted in Keys to Success | Tagged dream to reality, overcoming obstacles, steps to success | Leave a comment

Winning Attitude Essential for Success

By larrybuckley | Published: January 18, 2013

Winning Attitude Essential for Success

January is a good time to start again with a winning attitude and begin your climb. It’s a new year. It’s a fresh beginning. It’s a time for setting goals and developing a

A winning attitude can get you to the top.

A winning attitude can help you to keep climbing.

winning attitude. Actually, in the future you should set your goals in December so that you can start working on executing your plan on January 1 but there is no time like the present to start. Remember, you will never get what you want out of life if you never take the first step. And this is going to be a step by step journey. Setting goals is not even the first step. But January is still a good time to start thinking about where you want to be in the future.

In this entry I will talk about the one quality that is absolutely essential if you want to reach the summit. And that quality applies in any endeavor you tackle if you want to achieve excellence and high level of success. I mentioned that quality in the first paragraph. In this and future articles, I will generally talk about success in business, but if you want to succeed in a field that does not entail starting a business, you might still want to stick around. Many of the things I say will apply to you as well. Gold is not always actually gold. Sometimes it is your own personal dream and is only indirectly connected to money (But it does ultimately take at least some money to do just about anything worthwhile in life). When the goal is to succeed in business and many other goals in life, there is one quality that is required above all others.

A Winning Attitude Will Help You to Overcome the Leprechauns!

Regardless of what your dream may be, it will not be easy. In fact there are leprechauns everywhere who will do just about anything to keep you from getting to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And there are huge mountains in front of you in the form of obstacles and often those mountains seem to be immovable. They make it easy to just want to give up. And that is what most people do. The path of least resistance is the one that leads to a lifetime of talking about the “what ifs” in your past and the “almost achieved glory” that just barely slipped through your fingers.

So what is the difference between those who abandon the journey because it is too difficult and those who find ways to outwit the leprechauns and who find a way over, through, or under the mountains to achieve the impossible. As simplistic as it may sound, the difference is a winning attitude. That’s right. All other things being equal, the difference really is attitude. We have been told that enough faith will allow us to move mountains. Some people just never accept the concept that there can be an obstacle too big to overcome and they are willing to make the sacrifices to do whatever it takes to get past each mountain and continue on their journey to their dream.

A Winning Attitude Will Help You to Build a Cathedral!

A winning attitude is necessary if you are going to build a cathedral.

Some people lay bricks, some people build cathedrals.

And a winning attitude also means always thinking in terms of the end result. Some people call that vision. There is a story you may have heard about a man who saw three workmen laying bricks and he was the kind of person who was interested in how things worked. He was the kind of guy who could sit and watch people building stuff for hours or who would ask endless questions about anything mechanical that he saw. He just wanted to find out how things worked. So he approached one of the workmen and asked what he thought was a perfectly good question, “What are you doing?” The workman replied with what he thought was a perfectly good answer, “I am laying bricks.” This was entirely unsatisfactory to the questioner so he went on to a second workman and asked him the same question. This time the answer was a little better, “I’m a bricklayer, so I am doing the absolute best job I can to make sure every brick is in place perfectly so that the end result is a very solid wall.” Good answer but the man wanted to find out what the last bricklayer had to say so he asked him the same question. This workman looked up with pride in his eyes and in his voice and said, “I am building a cathedral.” The third builder had the ability to see the big picture and with the end result in mind, he had a strong vision of the future he wanted to create. That is a winning attitude.

More Desire or a Bigger Why!

Enough desire to succeed develops a winning attitude.

Desire Produces Winners.

To overcome all the obstacles it will take for you to have success there are two attitudes that are essential. If you have both, it is immensely helpful, but you absolutely must have at least one of them. The first is a passion for what you are doing. If you believe what you are doing is making the world a better place or if you just love doing what you are doing and take great pride in doing it, you will multiply your odds for success.. If you are doing work that seems like play, if you can’t wait to go to work every day, if you believe you are building a cathedral — you have upped your prospects immeasurably. There is an excellent article on exactly this subject by Tito Philips that might give you some insight into the concept. The second attitude that can give you the edge when the going gets rough is a big enough “why”. I know some of you have heard this before. And I am not suggesting that a big enough “why” is all it takes to achieve your dreams and goals. There are a lot of other necessary factors as well And I will talk about those factors in future articles. But again, all other things being equal, if a number of people all have exactly the same opportunity and the opportunity is a sound one, the one with the biggest “why” will find ways to overcome the obstacles that cause others to drop out of the game. What do I mean by a “big why”? I mean that your need to succeed is huge in your own mind either because you have a desperate need for money or because your dream is so powerful and so crystallized in your own mind that you can practically reach out and touch it. I will talk about your “why” more in a future blog and I will also discuss how you can make your dream more real, more touchable. Check out the article on The Renegade Blog that talks about your why. Either of these attitudes, an incredible passion for what you do or a huge reason for your desire to succeed, will help to sustain you through the difficult times which will inevitably come and help you to find success when others simply give up because it is just too hard. They will help you to have a winning attitude on the good days as well as on the bad.

I WOULD LIKE TO HEAR FROM YOU!

Posted in Winning Attitude | Tagged attitude, passion, your "why" | 2 Responses

Roadmap to Success

By larrybuckley | Published: January 3, 2013

ROADMAP TO SUCCESS

This blog is meant to stimulate your thinking. Only you can achieve your goals but I can provide some tools to help you on your journey. I can help you to create your own roadmap to success. It has to be yours. Everyone has a different roadmap. There are lots of routes to get to success. You have to map out your own.

To achieve your goals, obviously you should first actually HAVE some goals. And you really should have some dreams, too. What is the difference between goals and dreams? A lot of people will tell you dreaming is impractical. So goals are what make your dreams achievable. Goals could be described as practical dreams. This blog will take you from dreaming to actually achieving those dreams. To achieve your dreams and goals, you must have a vehicle to navigate your roadmap to success so you can arrive at your destination. Indeed, your vehicle itself becomes part of your roadmap to success. Although many of the principles we will talk about can be used in any facet of your life or in any type of career, this blog is designed to help those of you who want to achieve your dreams and goals through ownership of a business. If you don’t have any desire to start a business or grow an existing business, stick around anyway. The concepts you find here will help with any goals. But if you do want to open a business, it doesn’t matter whether your desire is to work full time or part time. It doesn’t matter whether your ambition is to grow a chain of locations with millions of dollars in annual sales or whether it is to work a part time network marketing business out of your home to help pay the family’s monthly bills. Business ownership may be the vehicle to success that you have been looking for.

LARRY BUCKLEY

Larry Buckley

My name is Larry Buckley. I have a wife, four grown kids, two dogs, three cats — the usual stuff. I am a Vietnam vet, so my early years out of high school were pretty tumultuous. But eventually I settled down. I studied political science in college so that I could be sure to get a job. Right! I wasn’t thinking too logically in those days. What can I say? I was young..

Even with my self inflicted handicaps, I did manage to find a job — in business. I worked for Kinko’s, a chain of business services stores that allowed me the best of different worlds. (To learn more about Kinko’s, read Copy This by Paul Orfalea or E Pluribus Kinko’s by Dean Zatkowsky . We had a complicated structure that I won’t even attempt to explain but within that structure over a period of seventeen years I was able to be a store manager, regional manager and finally one of the partners. The partnerships were smaller corporations so I was able to participate in the growth of a billion dollar company (the combined sales of the main corporation and partnership corporations) and also grow my own partnership that had a few million dollars in annual sales. The company was re-organized and eventually sold. In the process the partnerships were dissolved, so I was on my own again.

I spent a couple of years helping companies to develop leaders in their organizations and then joined a company where I would be able to work with businesses to offer them solutions to some common challenges but can also work with individuals to help them to achieve their goals. I have the freedom to be an entrepreneur and develop a team of talented people.

I have always developed leaders. Any goal I have ever achieved has been through the help of talented people, whether those people be family, friends, or co-workers. I have never been able to do this alone. In Kinko’s I developed and helped with national and regional training that allowed people to grow within the company and to develop leadership skills they could use in any endeavor they had in the future whether with our company or somewhere else. My passion is still to give others the tools to achieve great things, to develop their own personal roadmap to success. .

This blog is simply an extension of what I have done most of my adult life. I like to give people vehicles to succeed if they choose to use them. That’s who I am and that’s what this is all about.

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