Deception #5: Delay the Dream (I'll Pursue My Strengths Later)

Should you put off working on your dream job until later in life when you are more financially stable and other circumstances seem more promising? Investor Warren Buffett wryly says, “This is a little like delaying sex for old age”.

Pursue your strengths aggressively starting now and don’t stop, ever!

That doesn’t mean you won’t need a “day job”. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be delays, defeats, disappointments, denials and even a few dead horses on the strengthspath. There certainly will be. Stanford University Professors Lorna Catford and Michael Ray talk about “The Path of the Everyday Hero” in their brilliant book by that title. They suggest that all of us are somewhere on this archetypical pathway that includes the following phases:

Innocence – The easy, safe, and comfortable place

Call to Adventure - The beginning of the journey often precipitated by a crisis

Initiation - The acceptance of the call including the first step taken without guarantees

Dips, Disappointments, Delays, Defeat, Discouragement

Allies – People and resources come, sometimes it seems out of nowhere providing protection and advice

Breakthrough – The allies provide the way for successful resolution of the crisis or accomplishment of the task

Celebration – The journey ends with the hero’s return, bringing gifts or wisdom accumulated on the path.

The weekend before writing this, Susy and I went to see Mission Impossible 4. MI4 follows this outline very closely as does most every good movie you’ve seen and every good book you’ve read. It’s the outline for just about every Bible story I can think of. If we look closely, this is your life and my life when we are living it well.

Catford and Ray also share that the creative process is very closely aligned with this thing they call the hero’s path. The creative steps they suggest are Preparation, Frustration, Incubation, Strategizing, Illumination, and Verification. I identify with all this in the process of creating blogs, books, career design, and the strengthspathing I talk about here.

Seth Godin, in his book The Dip gives great insight into all this with regard to a very particular hero’s call that he describes as “Becoming Best In The World”. This little book offers up great contemporary examples from the worlds of business, entertainment, athletics, and his own life. He also offers up some suggestions that will help you figure out if you are experiencing a dip/delay or if you are in fact riding a dead horse. If it is a dead horse then of course the only sensible thing to do is dismount.



Your Moment of Truth: Now is your time to start down your strengthspath!