Something I want you to really sit with today is this: the people you see out in the world doing the things you want to do are not more special than you, they do not have something you do not have, and they were not born with something you were left without. All that separates you from them is that they started before you did, and they kept showing up, through failure and uncertainty and all the moments where it would have been easier to stop, and they just kept going anyway.
That is it. That is the whole thing.
I think about this through the lens of starting lines, because wherever you are standing right now is your starting line, and the distance between where you are and where you want to go is not the problem. The problem is never the distance. What actually determines whether you close that gap is whether you have genuine belief that a version of you already exists at the finish line, waiting for you to catch up.
When I was 21, a young mom getting my high school diploma with no evidence that anything bigger was possible, I had this wild idea that I was going to join the Army and become an Officer and earn a graduate degree. I didn't even have a diploma yet, and I was on food stamps and paying $525 a month in rent from student loans, and yet I was super grateful for every bit of it.
Nothing in my circumstances pointed toward where I was headed. The only thing I had was an unshakeable expectation that I was going to get there, and I envisioned that version of me every single day until she became the only version I could see. Five years later I was a commissioned Army Officer, ranked in the top ten percent of my class across the country, with a master's degree in hand.
Here is what I learned from that season that I have carried into everything since: consistency is not a discipline problem, it is a belief problem. When you truly believe you are going to reach that finish line, the actions follow naturally, because you cannot be in real belief and stay still at the same time. Belief moves you. It makes you choose differently, turn left when you always turned right, keep going on the days when stopping would have been so much easier, because somewhere inside you the expectation is already set that you are going to arrive.
I like to think about it like inviting your closest friend to dinner. You pick the restaurant, you get dressed, you get in the car and drive there and sit down at the table, and you wait, because you completely expect them to walk through that door. You are not hoping they show up, you are not wondering if it will work out, you have already decided in your mind that this dinner is happening and your body just follows that certainty all the way there.
Your goals work the same way, and it does not matter where your starting line is, whether you are the lead decision maker in a organization or just beginning to believe that a different life is possible for you at home. What will carry you from here to there is not a better plan or more information or waiting until the circumstances improve. It is the identity of the person who already knows they are going to make it, because your identity creates your actions, and your actions create everything else.
It's all possible.
If you believe it is.
I do.