Always Go With Your Passions...

Before he was a bestselling author, Deepak Chopra was a practicing endocrinologist with a successful, very conventional medical career in Boston. In the 1980s he walked away from much of it to write and teach about the connection between the mind and the body. Plenty of his colleagues thought that was a bad bet. He went on to write dozens of books. He's not speaking from a dorm room here. He's speaking as someone who had a lot to lose and went anyway.

This isn't permission to quit your job tomorrow. The point is about timing. "Is this realistic?" is a fair question, but it's usually asked way too early, before there's a first draft, a first rep or a first customer. Asked at that stage, it kills almost everything. Start first. Ask "how" instead of "whether." You'll get a much more honest answer once you have something real to judge.

Think about the person who always wanted to coach but figured it wasn't realistic with a full-time job. So they never looked into it. Now picture the version of them who skipped that question and volunteered to help with a Saturday rec league. A season later they know whether they love it, they know people in that world, and "realistic" is a much smaller question. Same passion, same job, totally different outcome. The only difference was which question they asked first.

What would you start this week if nobody, including you, was allowed to ask whether it was realistic?

Take one small step toward the thing you care about before Sunday, and let reality weigh in after you've given it something to work with.