Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow.

Being somebody " “Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow. We talk about how much we enjoy playing sports and yet plop ourselves in front of the television every night, too tired to move. We talk about how much we enjoy listening to music and how we want to learn an instrument, yet most of our time is spent scrolling through Instagram and Facebook until the apps let us know that we have consumed all the information on our feed for the past two days. If that isn’t a wakeup call, then let me be—it isn’t the number of days you have, it’s what you tell yourselves about them.

To put an end to that, go back to your first experience with growth—puberty. Everything hurt: your knees, your legs, your calves, your armpits, everything was expanding and swollen and caused you so much pain that you could barely sleep. Your mind has stored this information. Your subconscious mind remembers this pain and therefore does not want you to experience it. It protects you from the agony it remembers. But by protecting you from this imagined agony, it is stunting your growth, the very thing that has led you to the point where you are a breathing, functioning, capable adult.

Try this exercise:

Tony Buzan introduced the idea of mind maps as early as the 1970s. It was used by companies such as IBM and even the UN, and it has the potential to be ten times as effective as regular journaling.1 Grab a drawing paper and colors. Better yet, create an experience out of it, scented candles, music, and the works. This is your future you’re talking about. Draw yourself at the center of the map, and from it extend branches in different colors; it could be personal, professional, spiritual, health-centric—whatever you are interested in—and from that create stems. Along with words, take pictures—get creative. From the nucleus (you), you’ll see different ideas growing, ideas that have been latent within you that are now in colors and drawing, vivid as ever. This will make your vision concrete. With that clarity, and once you have figured out the why, the how will fall into place.