The Art of Work: A Proven Path to Discovering What You Were Meant to Do

year we had known each other. In my mind, I had built up
the fantasy of a relationship without ever sharing the vision
with her.
I think we do the same thing with our dreams. First, we
flirt with them from afar. Then we fantasize, imagining what
life will be like when we are united with what we love,
without ever doing any real work. We wait, building up
courage, and save all our passion for the big day when we
will abandon everything and go for it. And finally, we take
the leap.
Sometimes, though, we don’t make it to the other side.
We fall on our faces. Doing our best to pick ourselves up,
we dust ourselves off and try again. But if this happens
enough, we begin to tell ourselves a familiar story. We
remind ourselves that the world is a cold, cruel place, and
maybe there’s no room in it for my dream. We get
disillusioned and make the worst mistake you can make
with a calling: we save all our energy for the leap instead of
building a bridge.
The problem with how we chase our passions is that
reality doesn’t always conform to how things appear in our
minds. Lane said no because she didn’t know me. And as
much as I would have liked to think differently, I didn’t
really know her. Relationships take time, as do dreams.
They’re full of routines and unexciting work that make them
unfit for a movie script but appropriate for real life. For
nearly a decade, I did this with my passion. I dreamed of it,
talked about it, even made “plans” for when luck would