Are you holding on to something with the blind hope that things will fall into place? It’s easy to fall into that trap. I’ve run a marketing business for over a year, and I’ve always just been ONE client away from success. Guess what? That client hasn’t come yet.

Where was The Practical Nerd last week? He was on the job hunt. Finally, I managed to get in at Kohl’s Department Stores. I now work, second shift, in their customer service department. Is it glamorous? Nope. Is it what I want to do the rest of my life? Nope. But that doesn’t matter sometimes. My dreams have to be put on hold.

There’s an idealistic attitude among many people that they feel they can think their way to success (have you ever read The Secret? That’s pretty much it). Thinking can absolutely affect your success. If you think about it, it can really happen. But you have to do more than think. You need to take the necessary steps to position yourself for success. And sometimes, that means putting your dreams on hold.

My dream is to be a home-based businessman, not unlike what I had been doing – just more successfully. Am I giving up on that dream to work in customer service? Not a chance. In fact, I now have a job with some advancement potential that, while taking a lot of time out of my day, allows me to focus on getting quality work and quality clients. It allows me to relax and do what I love for the love of it, and that includes The Practical Nerd. No, I won’t have the hours and hours I used to have every day to work on my business. But it’s okay. You have to roll with the punches.

After I got this job, I was reading in bed at night, and I came across this beautifully-written excerpt in Scratch Beginnings by Adam Shepard (the true story of the author dropping himself in a city to live in a homeless shelter and build his way up from the bottom). At this point in the story, he has lived in the homeless shelter for a little over a month, and he has yet to sit on the disgusting toilet there. While a little bit uncomfortable to think about, it actually dovetails into a very valuable life lesson about changes:

But, I suppose, we adjust. And that’s what I was forced to do on day forty-two. Without volunteers to prepare dinner, Robert and a few other shelter inhabitants had whipped up a soon-to-be-infamous concoction of chipped beef with shredded cheese and a side dish of green beans with gravy. It was delicious, no doubt, but the line started forming to use the toilets before everybody had even been served their evening meal. One guy even ate his meal in the bathroom line, knowing that it was going to go right through him. And there I was among them, defaulting on my vow that my cheeks would never touch the stained porcelain lavatories at Crisis Ministries.

We adjust. That’s what we do. We seize the opportunities that are given to us, and we adjust to make up for what is kept from us. In some cases, and certainly in the case of the toilets on my forty-second day at the shelter, we don’t have a choice. We embrace change or we fight it off. In the end, it is said, change makes us stronger. Even if we deny the change and retreat back to the norm, the experience has helped us to grow and understand what is on that other side, and it has given us the freedom to make more informed decisions in the future.

That’s beautiful – and true. Change isn’t always pleasant, but it makes you stronger, and it may give you a better opportunity to work toward your dreams down the line. Don’t give up on your dreams, but don’t let them consume your life either.

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