To most people, the dream of quitting their 9-5 job to go backpacking around the world sounds far-fetched, impossible, and to some, irresponsible. But what those people don’t know is, hundreds, if not, thousands of people per year turn this dream into a reality.
But how do they turn their dreams into a reality when most dreams are put to the back burner of a never-ending to-do list? Take a close look at your to-do list. For each nagging task on this pain-staking to-do list, I’m sure you can think of at least 3 good reasons for putting it off.
But to make your wildest dreams a reality, one day you have to wake up and decide if you don’t do it now, you never will. You have to wake-up everyday with the inclination that this could be your last day and tell yourself, it’s better to look back on life and say, “I can’t believe I did that,” then to look back and say, “I wish I did that.”
To live the life of your dreams, you have to decide to become the person that looks back at their memories with a sense of disbelief, instead of with regret. You have to be the type of person that takes the leap into the unknown without pausing to ask or answer the, “what if’s” which only add to the never ending list of reasons of why you can’t.
There is a lot of truth to the old saying, “If you believe you can’t, you won’t.” One morning I woke up and decided that I would quit buying into the endless chatter of “what if’s,” quit my job, and buy a plane ticket. Now, sitting on the plane back home, I look out at the wing zooming through the clouds, already imagining what’s next: finding another home in the mountains to snowboard all year long, using income from my side hustle to fund the slopes and even more travel.
Once the travel bug bites there is no known antidote and I know that I shall be happily infected until the end of my life.
– Michael Palin
I can honestly say that I have never been happier to be infected with such a big bite! Now that I risked everything to travel through three continents, the fourth did not seem too far out of reach. Now that I had done it not once, or twice, but three times, I was already itching to do it all over again.
