Fleeting Dreams jordanmarsh6, September 30, 2021April 5, 2023 I’ve had a lot of dreams in my life. I remember watching Duke play at Cameron Indoor Fieldhouse on tv as a kid and dreaming that I’d play there one day (didn’t happen lol). I’ve dreamed of giving a TED Talk one day. I don’t really know what I would talk about, but I love public speaking and TED seems like the epitome of that. There have been times where I am ready to declare that it is a huge goal of mine, and times where I forget that it was ever an idea at all. There’s a million more: I want to be in great physical shape, I want to start a company, I want to do cool research, I want to be a writer, etc. It is frustrating how seemingly fleeting my motivation to do certain things is. One day, I am absolutely convinced and committed to a particular path; the next, I forgot what that path was. I’m assuming that I am not alone in this. From what other people have told me about pursuing goals, the feeling is not just my own. At the risk of embarrassing myself, I wanted to give a concrete example of this. When my wife started grad school, I got it into my head that I was going to try and pay off all her debt before she finished grad school. This would require a fairly large sum of money within only a two-year period. I had a plan. I was going to start a MCAT (the test you take to get into med school) tutoring company, start teaching online on the side, build up a client base, then hire other students who got great scores, and then evaporate the debt we incurred from grad school. I wrote out this entire plan in my journal and declared that that debt would be gone in two years. Well it didn’t happen. It was a nice idea but putting it into practice was much more difficult than imagining it all in my head. Other shiny things caught my attention from day to day, and that big, bold goal that I wrote down in my journal got buried behind other pages of ideas I had. Whenever I look back at that page, I cringe a little bit. It’s a perfect example of how fleeting my drive to pursue things can be sometimes. I can say that I feel this blog has helped me identify what’s going on with me. I am more cognizant of my own flaws, and I suspect that that awareness alone might be a large step towards following through on the things I want the most. If you’re reading this, I hope that this might help you be more aware of what stops you too. If it means anything to you, I do think that the body of knowledge and ideas that I’m collecting on this blog will help us get out of our ruts. I know I am on to something. So please keep coming back! Self Improvement