Blog | Personal Finance

Achieving Your Dreams with Three Simple Words

Changing who you are to get what you want

I have a friend named Pat who wanted to be a writer for TIME magazine. I asked her, “If you want to have an article published in TIME, then who do you have to be?”

“I have to be a first-rate writer,” she replied.

I followed up with this question, “And what do you have to do?”

“I have to find out what types of articles TIME wants. I may have to take some writing courses to brush up on my skills. I have to research my article and write it. I must find out whom to submit my articles to, submit them, and follow up. If rejected, I have to keep repeating the process until I get published. There’s probably other steps, but I won’t know them until I get started.”

Be – Do – Have

The concept my friend Pat illustrated with her answer is a key to achieving any dream: Be – Do – Have.

Be is your beingness: who you are. Do is the doingness: what you do. Have is your havingness: what you have. So, who you are and what you do determines what you have. By concentrating on what you want to have, you will be able to figure out what you have to do.

It sounds simple, but everything you have today is because of who you are and what you have done up to this moment. If you want to change what you have, you have to change who you are and what you do.

How to change

My friend Pat is a good example of this. She knew that if she wanted to write for TIME, she would have to make some changes. She was not a first-rate writer, and she needed to be one. She knew she might have to take some writing classes, get up-to-date with the publication, network with editors and form relationships with them, take rejection gracefully, and learn how to use feedback to rewrite and resubmit her work.

By doing all of that, Pat will change who she is. She will go from being a mediocre writer to being a great one.

This is not how most people operate. Most people first look at all they have to do, which seems like too much work. So, they never start. In the process, they never change, and they never get what they want to have.

Make your change today

Today is the day. What do you want to have? Who do you have to be to get that? What do you have to do to be that person? By answering these questions, you can achieve your dreams. You just have to start.