Go Get It.

Hire a Felon. Seriously. Why are we starting our own businesses?

Go Get It.

I was poor most of my life. I’ve cut mold off one end of the cheese block. I’ve gathered children’s half-eaten apples and used them to make applesauce. I’ve cut up stale food bank bread and made it into French toast sticks. I’ve felt like the shabbily dressed one, the boxed-hair-color one, the ragged cuticle nailed one in many settings.

Truth: While we talk a good game about America being the land of opportunity, our economy is set up so the poor usually stay poor. If you are poor — if you’ve ever stared at a bounced check notice and had absolutely no idea how you were going to handle it, or if you’ve ever been far from home with $3 in gas money — you might make a few visitations to lower middle class over your life, but you’re probably not going to be president.

Now, you may be mentally arguing that our current president was a poor kid on food stamps once. In fact, if you look you’ll find other examples of poor kids who made good — celebrities, inventors, brilliant minds, who beat the odds and made it to the top. We hear about them because they did beat the odds. The odds were stacked against them, and with some combination of hard work, brains and luck, they overcame the odds.

By definition then, most people do not overcome the the odds. Most of us will not be millionaires. We will not win the lottery. We will not be discovered by Simon Cowell during a late night karaoke session. We will not save the president’s daughter and become a media darling.

Please understand, I’m not trying to kill your hope. “Hope” is a small word, but it keeps our eyes open and our hearts beating. But while we all need a certain amount of wild imaginings, those aren’t hope. Notice that with each of my examples, your ultimate success is beyond your control. Unless you pulled a Lucille Ball, you didn’t arrange for Simon Cowell to be in that seedy karaoke bar, and hopefully you didn’t put the president’s daughter in danger so that you could rescue her. You were just walking along one day and something amazing happened to you that solved all of your problems and catapulted you into a world of fine dining, high fashion, fast cars and adoring paparazzi. Fantasies are fun, but they aren’t useful when you’re making life decisions.

Keep your imaginings, but separate them from your hope. What is your hope? That you’re kids will never grow to hate you? That your romantic relationship will endure and age into the finest of wines? That you’ll reach a point of financial security, where the phrases “pay bills” or “grocery shopping” don’t cause an automatic clench in your stomach? That you’ll be able to help the less fortunate, instead of always being helped by the more fortunate? That you’ll be healthy?

These sound like modest goals, but in truth, they are everything. Even the ones are born or stumble into wealth, security and fame often fail to find them, even knowing, as you do — as we all do — that these hopes are far more under our control than the wild imaginings.

Of course none of these hopes are completely under your control. A bad heart arrhythmia or failing pancreas can break a lot of the above hopes. You can’t fix the economy. You can’t make people love you. No matter how much we put into our children, in the end they will do what they will do. The same goes for our romantic love.

Unlike your wild imaginings, though, attaining your hope is often under your control. You can work out, train, practice, get counseling, or educate yourself. Also, unlike your wild imaginings, you can improve the odds.

Back when my life was the hardest, when I was virtually always exhausted and my nerves were drawn taut between the grip of money worries and terror of the future, I sometimes talked about the dream of losing weight. At that point it was more of a fantasy than a hope; I really had nothing left inside of me to direct toward such a pretty dream. But that didn’t stop people from giving helpful advice, like, “Just get up a half hour earlier and work out! It’s just a half hour so you won’t miss the sleep and it will make all the difference.”

Here I’ll stop to reassure you that I didn’t kill people who said that to me, or even cut long ribbons of flesh off their faces (I tended to reserve that for people who reminded me that God never gave me more than I could bear). At any rate, it made me angry. It hurt me. It made me indignant: How can anyone, knowing I was caring for a chronically ill, dying man, smile into my strung out face and recommend that I do more?

But — and here’s the important thing — I did do more. I plotted books in my head while pushing IV’s. I took notes on healthcare customer service rep’s speech patterns while I argued with them. I sat in frigid emergency room cubicles, butt-numb on hard plastic chairs, typing word after word after word, making my lovers lover deeper, my bad guys meaner, my tension more goose-bumpy.

I had no money. I ate badly. My kids were miserable and their dad was a dying shell. Health care collection companies knew my favorite color and my dogs’ name. My giant hair had bloomed into a tumbleweed with gray roots. But by God I wrote.

For many people, selling a novel is a fantasy, one of those wild imaginings. But for me, it was a hope. Writing is as central to me as the bones in my spine. I had a goal, and I had a plan to get there. In 2011 I sold three books, just before my life changed entirely. The hope was realized.

This blog is almost a thousand words long, so I’m sure anyone who happened to click this way has already moved on, but I’ll get to the point anyway.

Around the time I turned twelve, two things happened to me: I started to eat for comfort, and my love for reading grew into a need to write. In concrete terms, selling a book is actually more difficult than losing weight. However hard it may be internally, if you eat well and exercise enough, you will lose weight. The only factor really beyond your control is health conditions — issues or medications that genuinely prevent weight loss. No matter how hard you work to learn to write well and create a great finished products, your success will always be dependent on the opinion (whim) of editors and the reading public.

in my case though, while I often imagined myself at a healthy weight, it wasn’t real in my mind. By contrast, selling a book was absolutely inevitable. That was my hope. If someone had advised me to get up a half hour earlier to sell a book, I might not have been able to do it because of physical limitations, but I would have seen the logic.

As I mentioned, things have changed for me. I say I don’t write anymore, although of course I send this blog out into the void every month. My passion is for my Filemaker business is nearly as core as the writing, and much more tangibly rewarding. I’m 49 years old, so my acute awareness of my mortality has elevated healthy living from a pretty imagining to a core hope.

Now you know my story. What is yours? Sort through your favorite dreams. Which are core hopes? Which are pretty imaginings?

Have you allowed life, obligations, or the expectations of others to drive your core hopes into the background?

I made so, so many mistakes during those hard years (I continue to make them) and abandoned more of my core self than I retained. The writing was one of the last and only things I held on to. But my absolute, unquestioning commitment paid off (in satisfaction; not in any tangible way).

That’s the part of you that I want you to find. Whether it’s writing, or Filemaker developing, or being a doctor, admit it. Honor it. Own it. Let it own you. Maybe it seems like one of your wild imaginings, like that time when you were the only person on a plan who was able to talk down the terrorist and save the 213 souls on board. Maybe people in your life agree — maybe they’re a Greek chorus of Can’t. But you know. When your hands start to shake from exhilaration watching a surgery. When stories run in your head, night and day. When you see an injustice and are obsessed with righting the wrong.