PURSUE YOUR DREAMS

OK, be honest, if you were the father of this bride and wrote a blog, could you help yourself from sharing these photos?

My daughter earned a degree in Fashion Design from the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York City.  It was a grueling program.  She had to pull numerous all-nighters to complete her assignments.  She graduated with honors.  Her career goal is to design wedding dresses.  Well, this is a good start, don't you think?  She sketched, designed, selected the fabrics and other materials and sewed this dress by hand.  It has taken over 250 hours to complete.  I have watched this come together stitch by stitch.  The incredible fabrics, the sequins, the hundreds of individually made fabric flower petals, the thousands of tiny beads lovingly sewn on one at a time.  For the past five years she has worked around the clock toward making her dream of being a fashion designer a reality.  Currently she works two jobs while taking a full load of college classes toward a marketing degree all the while planning every detail of the wedding event of the century.

It is my belief that everyone of us has gifts and talents.  I'm also aware that for various reasons that people do not always develop their gifts and talents.  This is a great waste.  The reasons probably are different in every circumstance.  Work ethic, family support, funding, destructive behavior, etc.  Never-the-less we as a people are collectively worse off when this happens.  This TIP FROM A MAN is in two parts: 1) If you have a gift or talent, figure out how to pursue it.  Discipline yourself.  Rally a team around you.  Don't let it die.  Don't let discouragement or the haters hold you back... and 2) Look around you and see who has a talent that they are not pursuing and encourage them to "go for it."  I recently heard of a young man who loved skiing and pursued it as a youth.  His family then moved to the southeastern US so he was no longer able to ski and so he took up other sports.  He excelled in these other sports and even earned a Division I scholarship to play baseball in college but skiing was always on his mind.  One day he asked his father what he thought if he gave up the scholarship and pursued skiing.  His wise father understanding the importance of following dreams said, "I think you should do it."  This young man is now one of the top mogul skiers in the world and is working toward a spot on the US team that will compete in the 2014 Olympic games.

Life is too short not to develop our talents.  The bible in Matthew 25:14-30 instructs us in the importance of growing and not hiding our talents.  Don't settle.  Never give up.  But don't expect anything to be handed to you either.  Most talents need to be developed through hard work, perseverance and repetition.  If the breaks don't go your way, that is OK.  In the end, you can only control your effort.  Don't hold anything back.  Be satisfied with the effort and let the results be what they may.

Enjoy life!