Overcoming the obstacles to make ambitious dreams a reality is the only option for me. I would call it anything but easy! It's necessary and deeply fulfilling to know that I am taking steps toward my long-term goals! I've just started getting everything in line for me to make my dreams come true and I am totally excited. There is a lot of work involved in simply making a decision, hoping it's the right decision and figuring out how to overcome potential obstacles in the future. Meanwhile, I know that the decisions I'm making now are preparatory and that soon, I will be on track!

You cannot call yourself ambitious, if you have dreams that you never act on. Dreams and desires are accompanied by determination. Always. What sets the ambitious apart from the unambitious is learning to recognize determination and use it to start making moves. If you don't move, you won't go anywhere. As long as you're moving, you will eventually find yourself right where you've always wanted to be, even if you do get a little lost along the way. The trick is to keep moving and correct yourself when you realize you've wandered off track somehow.

I've been down a road where all I had was a dream I wasn't acting on. It was the hardest and most chaotic life I've ever lived. I finally got to a point where I looked at what I was doing in comparison to what I wanted to do and what my goals are and I said to myself, "What are you waiting for? Nothing is going to come to you if you keep waiting. You have to get up and go get it yourself. You'll find it quicker if you go after it, than if you keep sitting still and waiting for it." Now, I'm about to enter grad school and start working toward my first Master's degree. This is the first step to obtaining the PhD I've always wanted. Next step is to simply keep after it and not stop until I get there. I'm getting an education and I will soon find a job where I can pass that education on to others as well. I realized not too long ago that without education, I'm lost. So now I'm getting back into school as a student so I can learn how to lead a classroom as a teacher. But this would not be happening for me if I hadn't chased after it.

Q: What's easier for you, having ambitious dreams and never acting on them, or overcoming the obstacles to make an ambitious dream a reality?

A: Well, what's *easier* is having the dream and not acting on it, because like many others, I have an imagination so vivid that I can lay down, close my eyes, and walk through the experience and feel it like reality, such that on those occasions when I have bothered to go out and actually do it, it was almost disapointing how the real thing wasn't as good as how I'd imagined...

There was no suprise to any of it, and it was always way more complicated weaving around the humans than it had been in my imagination, such that it ended up being not an excecise of skill and creativity for realizating tyhe dream - that was the easy part - rather, in order for it to actually happen, it became a game of working around the obstructive psychologies of other people, so realization of dreams has tended to be a fairly annoying experience, because the challenge was on handling people, and not on the actual tactics of implementing the dream.

However, it's been reported by every person willing to grant death-bed interviews that ultimately, no matter what kind of life they lived, what they *all* had in common in terms of regrets was... no *matter* what those regrets were, they *all* regrets things they *had NOT* done.

Nobody regretted things done.

They might have at the time or shortly thereafter, such that they were apologetic... but what they *regreted* was not having *done* something to made *amends* for the mistake!

So, even though I can experience the effects of a successful venture better from my imagination that from reality, and even though in reality the problem is not going to be one of conceptualizing the idea and figuring out the logistics - rather, the challenge is going to be an annoying process of cutting through and weaving around humans who can only justify their existence by getting in the way, which is boring and frustrating as far as challenges go, because it's way more fun and interesting to be able to just focus on building the dream - still...

... I choose to make the dreams reality, because all credible reports from death-bed interviews say that I'll be happier if I do than if I don't.