I am potential unlimited. I am still
writing the story of my life and can make it into anything I want.
Potential isn’t something I was given at birth; rather, it’s something I
develop.
Today is the only day my potential has meaning. When I say yes to life
and work on my dreams, I have unlimited potential. When I say no to
life and am overwhelmed by inaction, I have zero potential.
Low potential never traps me, and I don’t worry whether I have enough to
make my dreams come true. Potential isn’t something that must be
present before the fact of change. It’s something that happens after
the fact. Positive change is what makes potential possible. If I want
to have more potential, I only need to make positive changes, and my
potential will skyrocket.
I was not born with a lump of potential that determines the limits and
outcome of my life. I can make it into anything I want. My commitment
to positive action causes my potential to expand exponentially year
after year. When I ignore any worries about my potential and
concentrate on making positive changes happen, my potential does just
fine.
People are always asking the wrong questions about sailing around the
world. The most frequent question is how much it costs to buy a yacht
and do a circumnavigation. The second question is about how much time
it takes, and the third question is about pirates and hurricanes. I
understand why they ask those questions, but there are other
more
important questions on which they need to focus.
Questions like the following:
How many lives do you get?
If you aren't living your dreams now, when are you going to start?
How many years are you guaranteed to have perfect health?
How many years are you going to be alive?
These are the questions that really matter. It's easy to forget the
facts of life.
Here are the facts of life.
1. You only get one life.
2. Life is short and death is long.
3. There is virtually no reason that you should not be living your
dreams.
On the wall above my computer, I have a large chart that shows the
timeline of human history. It goes from neolithic and paleolithic times
right up to the present. It shows the major empires that for a time
spread across and ruled planet earth. Some of those civilizations
lasted for more than a thousand years, and now they are gone. Billions
of anonymous people had their shot at life and then disappeared leaving
hardly a trace.
When I traveled in the Saudi desert, I sometimes found arrowheads lying
in the sand. The last person who touched that arrowhead lived in
neolithic times more than eight thousand years ago. That arrowhead
reminds me of the shortness of life, and that I should be living my
dreams.
Your short stay on planet earth is frighteningly brief. It's like a
puff of smoke or the flash of a meteor in the night sky. The facts of
life are very clear. Life is way too short to not be living your
dreams.
Go ahead. Live your dreams and make every day count for something good.
Even though your life is short, there is no limit to how good it can
become.
This particular patch of paradise
is at Conception Island in the southern Bahamas. We are cruising in the
company of Txai, a Voyager 440 catamaran sailed by Brazilian
adventurers.
It took eleven years to sail around the world in our forty foot
catamaran, and we crossed our outbound track in the southern Bahamas.
We had eleven years of clean air and crystal clear water. Although
our voyage didn't rock the world, it rocked our world, and we actually
made our dreams come true.
