Your Dreams Will Come True
Chance can be on our side, if we but stir it up with our energies, stay receptive to its every random opportunity, and continually provoke it by individuality in our hobbies, attitudes, and our approach to life.
James H. Austin, Chase, Chance, and Creativity: The Lucky Art of Novelty
My wife and I are approaching the phase of life commonly called retirement.
Part of our plan was to relocate.
My vision for the ideal location was not the same as hers.
There was a significant overlap but also important differences in our ideal location.
We both had our lists of what features our new home would have.
We debated about which ones were most important and which ones were unreasonable.
One of my criteria was a climate with milder winters.
One of hers was staying close to the grandkids.
In this case, hers won out.
But the important thing was that we combined and refined our individual criteria into a mutual list roughly ranked by priority.
Without this work, we would still be fantasizing about our dream homes well into our nineties.
We began searching online for homes that mostly matched our list.
In every case, there was a deal breaker: too expensive, too far away, missing too many of the features we were looking for.
Just a week before, my wife expressed her frustration to a friend about me sending her links to properties that didn’t fit what we wanted.
A few came close, and I kept my eye on them.
Most of them stayed on the market for at least a month or two.
Sometimes there would be a modest price reduction, but those properties remained out of reach.
One Saturday, I sent my wife a link with the message, “This may be our answer.”
We talked about the listing and got somewhat excited.
I knew the other listings lasted about a month, so I wasn’t in a hurry to set up an official viewing.
But I thought I would find the place and see what it looked like from the road.
My wife said, “If you’re going, so am I.”
We set up a viewing for Tuesday and made the drive.
That evening our offer had been accepted.
From the outside, it appeared that we had just been lucky and had made an impulse decision.
(I left out many other details that made us feel even more like someone had crafted this opportunity just for us.)
But we began preparing for that day years before we had any clear idea of what we wanted.
Equally important, we refined our understanding of what we wanted over the past few years.
We also relied on the advice of experts and friends leading up to the final decision.
All these factors allowed our dream to become a reality.
Don’t neglect your dreams.
Get them out and examine them.
Refine them.
Be prepared when your “lucky break” shows up.
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