“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.  The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”  — Theodore Roosevelt

Every time I read that I can almost feel the chills.  “…at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”  That is so powerful, inspiring, and motivating.

Two of my favorite articles here on The Rat Race Trap are Develop the Courage to Take Risks and 17 Ways to Achieve Heroic Goals.  Underlying both of those articles is the idea of thinking big.  Recently I read a short little book called The Think Big Manifesto by Michael Port and it got me pondering the subject again.  The book did not enthrall me, but I like what his is trying to do over at The Think Big Revolution.

In this article I’m going to share some of my thoughts and some of Michael’s thoughts with you.

“We are the biggest obstacle that stands in the way of our doing big things in the world.  We are our own worst enemies.”  –Michael Port

Small Thoughts

You don’t need a guru to tell you how to start thinking big.  You just need to start doing. it.  It’s not hard to think big.  It’s only hard to stop thinking small.  I think we all struggle with it every day.  I know that I do, but I’m determined to kill the small thoughts that are holding me back.  Are you?

Some small thoughts we think:

1. I’m not.
2. I don’t.
3. I can’t.
4. I’ll try.
5. I don’t have time.
6. I don’t have the energy.
7. I’m only one person.
8. Pop culture.
9. Television.
10. People magazine.
11. Corporate culture.
12. Intolerance.
13. Our past determines our future.
14. We are never enough.
15. For every winner there is a loser.

Big Thoughts

“Small thoughts fear the future.  Big thoughts are the future.”  –Michael Port

We will rise no higher than we think and if we want to achieve big things, we better stop thinking small and start thinking big.

“The time has come.  We cannot wait anymore.  For years we have hidden behind our own small thoughts or let ourselves be held back by other small thinking people who don’t believe in us.  Worse still, we have been rejected as marginal, unrealistic, dreamers, idealists, maybe even delusional.  Family, friends, colleagues and others (not to mention our own selves) have tried to negate us, eliminate us, and silence us.  We will not stand for it anymore.”  –Michael Port

Big thoughts are different things to different people and that’s perfectly OK.  Being realistic is OK and is not small thinking as long as it is expansive and well outside your comfort zone.  Starting my own business is a big thought to me.  That might be a small thought for someone else.

Here are examples of big thoughts for you to think about.

1. Build your own business.
2. Change jobs.
3. Change careers.
4. Go back to school.
5. Come out of the closet.
6. End relationships with those who hold you back.
7. Run a marathon.
8. Follow your dream in the arts.

What now?

“There is NO right FIRST STEP and no last step.  To begin to think big is ORGANIC.  Once you start it will grow like the seashell, your thoughts EXPANDING ever upward and outward.”  –Michael Port

There is an abundance of solutions, we only need to start thinking and acting big to create them.  You are abundant.

“We are are own pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.”  –Kim George

Get high on life.  If you are comfortable and safe you are thinking small.  If you are uncomfortable and excited you are thinking big.

You can’t do things perfectly.  Trying to do things perfectly will guarantee you will never do them.  Just go for it.  Modify along the way.  The best planning technique in existence is to modify as you experience.

“Fall down seven times, stand up eight.”  –Japanese proverb

Make promises to yourself and others and keep them.  There is no better way to develop a sense of personal integrity and self-esteem.  If you aren’t going to do it then say so and say why.  Be honest.  I tell people no all the time and yet they seem to respect me and return.  Making promises you can’t or won’t keep makes you small in their eyes and more importantly in your own eyes.

Promise something big and uncomfortable.  Make it public.  It’s almost a guarantee of success.  Promise your readers you are going to lose 30 pounds in three months and promise them weekly updates.  You will lose 30 pounds in three months.

“We will make promises.  Big promises.  Promises hard to fulfill.  Yet we will – fulfill.”  –Michael Port

Blow the lid off of yourself and do something big.  Live each day as if it is your last but look forward to living forever.  I don’t plan on living forever, but I believe that human near-immortality is on the horizon.  I am thinking big about long life.

As an eighteen year-old freedom lover, I was excited about what I heard come out of Ronald Reagan’s mouth in ‘79 – ‘80.  By 1984 he had shown he was just another disappointing politician who would compromise away principles and I decided to ignore politics and pursue freedom some other way.  Within a few years I had been totally swallowed up by the rat race.

Today I read the following quote by him and found it beautiful and appropriate.

“Life is one grand, sweet song, so start the music.” –Ronald Reagan

Get Free Updates to The Rat Race Trap by Email here or via a reader in the top left sidebar.  I would love to have you on board.

Note from Stephen:  This article is by Annette Colby PhD. She produces fabulous content so please check out her site.

Are you disappointed, discouraged and discontented with your present level of success? Are you secretly dissatisfied with your present situation? Do you want more abundance, inner peace, joy or happiness? Do you want improved health, a lighter body, or an end to a food obsession or addiction?

Yes, you can have what you want! Of course, you can. Yet accomplishing your dreams and creating change can be an involved and ongoing process. Despite this fact, at certain times in our lives, we dare to dream of a bigger life. Courageously we bring an inner desire up into our conscious awareness and feel the magnificence of a greater life. Excitement begins to bubble, and our hearts open as we anticipate new possibilities. Using all our available skills and tools, we set forth in the achievement of this new dream. Things move forward, and then one day the inevitable occurs: our bubble bursts. Reality hits us between the eyes and tells us we cannot have what we want.

Reaching a big obstacle or hitting a wall is exactly what happens when you dare to venture into new dreams. Why? Because your dream is a life experience you have never had before. It is an imagined reality, a fantasy, a made-up pretend world never before lived by you. You have dared yourself to discover if you are capable of letting go of old ways of thinking, acting, believing, feeling, and choosing, and now doing all of those things differently.

As you encounter a major setback or obstacle, it is easy to loose faith in your ability to create a new life. Quite often the difficulty in front of you is larger than the skills or beliefs you currently possess. You face decisions you are not used to making, uncomfortable risks, and accepting more responsibility than you are accustomed to accepting. When your next step forward seems impossible, it is tempting to give up and tell yourself that you cannot have what you want because you are incapable, unworthy, or undeserving.

Nothing is further from the truth. Instead, you have reached this very obstacle because you have worked hard to bring yourself to this point of change. You are now facing an opportunity of important personal growth and emotional healing. Your challenge or obstacle is a necessary place of decision on your journey. One choice is to turn back to the known and comfortable life you are accustomed to living. The other choice leads you courageously forward to generate new beliefs about your abilities, build new skills, and uncover strengths you did not know you possessed.

To get through the challenges of your goal-achieving journey, the following steps can ease the way:

1) Acceptance

Acceptance of where you are right now is an important component of change. Acceptance is simply recognition. Recognition is vitally important, because to recognize what doesn’t feel good makes it so much easier to look around and wonder what might feel better. Acceptance is an agreement to appreciate, validate, accept and support who you are at this very moment, even though there are aspects you would wish to change. You can face reality head-on without judgment – opening your eyes to explore the full, and sometimes messy, truth of what exists in your world without using illusions to pretend otherwise. You stop attempting to lay your problem on someone else’s shoulders. You realize no one outside of you will wave a magic wand and dissolve the problem. You can also stop blaming yourself. What you cannot accept, you cannot love. What you cannot love you cannot release.

2) Dream from the Heart

Lay your foundation of success by creating a strong vision of the life you want to be living. Take time to develop a new life potential by visualizing yourself as you want to be, not as you currently are. This involves going inside, sorting through some ideas and deciding which dreams, which desires, which outcomes feel exciting. Then instead of playing victim, blaming others, or dwelling on the worry or anxiety of what you don’t want in your life, you teach yourself to create an exciting partnership with something important to you. To succeed you must first dream! Dreams develop new possibilities, and give your life direction, purpose, and meaning.

3) Energy In Equals Energy Out

The energy that you place into the formation and nurturing of your vision is the energy that will be present when your dream becomes real. Create a bond of passion, love, and excitement between you and your dream. What you want is beautiful and good. Allow this love between you and your goal to be real and tangibly experienced. This excitement is the kind of internal love that says, “Yes! This is a good idea, a fun idea. I’ll spend more time playing with this idea, imagining myself living this idea, and taking action to bring this idea to life.” As you connect with your imagined outcome, you feel good once again. Feeling good makes you glad to be alive. Feed this increased sense of aliveness back into your dream by playing with your new potentials, new possibilities, and new opportunities.

4) Imagine Often

Imagination isn’t simply a visual picture of what is wanted. It is a full body experience. Take the time each day to sit, internally create, and celebrate a completely new world. You have the ability to pull up exciting ideas and share love, joy and life with your ideas and your body. The feeling good you are looking for doesn’t arrive in an shipping package later in time once you achieve your desire. The feeling good comes now as you allow ourselves to feel good because of your vision. Picture how happy you are living the dream, envision the details of this new expression of self, feel the exciting emotions of having what is wanted in exactly the way it is wanted. You can feel good right now.

5) Decide

Decide to achieve your dream. This may seem basic but many people never decide and commit fully to their dream. They simply keep “thinking” about it. Or, as the first obstacle appears they give up. Make a commitment to self that this is what you want. Obstacles, many of them, are going to arise. Failures and setbacks will occur. Deciding to succeed helps you develop a strong internal leader who will carry you through the good times and the rough times. By deciding that you will ultimately achieve your dream, you develop an internal leader who can remember the big picture no matter what is going on in the present moment. How and when you reach your destination is entirely flexible, but reaching the destination is no longer up for debate.

6) Take Action

For a dream to come true of course, you have to take action! Decide where you are now, and what seems like the right place to begin. Action means starting at the right place at the right time. Begin by choosing the smallest, most achievable, or most exciting steps that will create movement toward the desired outcome. Why the smallest steps? First, success builds on success. Secondly, huge, dramatic life-changing solutions rarely work. Instead, major changes are a result of a series of small steps that are taken, successfully completed, acknowledged, and then celebrated.

7) Expectation

Believe in the outcome of your dream. In the beginning, your belief may be small, but that is still and excellent place to begin. Find even the smallest seed of hope and possibility and look for ways to nurture your expectation of success. You may have no idea how to get from where you are to where you want to go, but it is essential that cultivate a growing belief that you can, ultimately, have what you want. Use positive affirming messages to self, pictures of success, encouraging thoughts, motivational tapes, prayer, self-love, visualization. Do whatever you can and expend however much effort is necessary to reaffirm your dream and the belief that you can have what you want. It’s okay to have fear. Fear often means you are heading in the right direction. Your fear is a signal that your dream or goal is something that you really want. Only you don’t know exactly how to make your dream come true, so fear pops up to step you from risking failure. Acknowledge fear as part of the journey and don’t let it sway your expectation of overall success.

Responsibility

Feeling good, being excited about being alive involves taking responsibility for your life and your choices. Feeling good is a choice. Deciding to feel good also requires action. If you are feeling anxious, stressed, overwhelmed, hopeless, or even depressed, your responsibility to reach inside and search for an idea or thought feels good and inspires. Only you can decide if your dreams are important enough to overcome any adversity you may face. What is one small action you could take right now to help you regain your confidence? No matter how much effort it might require, follow through and take that step.

9) Acknowledge Both Effort and Success

Keep a check list of all the successful, wonderful effort and action you put into achieving your goal. Chart all your achievements and efforts, big and small. Without a tracking process, you can’t see how far you have come. And if you can’t see your efforts, you are more likely to quit. Celebrate often. If the celebration is postponed until the end of the journey, you miss the entire soul purpose of having the dream. This is of course to feel better and more optimistically alive in the present moment.

10) Visit Your Dream Often

When you run into a wall, encounter a setback, or fail in your current attempt to achieve success, reconnect with your dream. When things seem most unattainable, you need to regain your strength in order to avoid giving up. The reason you spent time at the beginning imagining your goal, nurturing your goal, and creating a bond of love between you and your goal, was so that you could refuel when you need it most. You put love into your dream when you felt optimistic. Now that you are feeling tired, or even a bit hopeless, go back to your dream and allow it to feed your love back into you.

Creating the life of your dreams will require much effort, emotionally, spiritually and physically. Fall in love with the journey itself – not just the outcome. Fall in love with yourself for having a dream. Self-love is a consuming passion for our own happiness. It is a choice you make to focus your attention on beautiful outcomes. Follow the steps above and create your own world of dreams made real!

Want to make your world brighter and more exciting? Want to leave feeling exhausted, stressed, depressed, or overweight behind forever? Subscribe to our wonderful weekly free Loving Miracles newsletter at www.AnnetteColby.com and learn how to wake up each morning energized and glad to be alive.

Copyright 1997–2009 Annette Colby, PhD. All rights reserved in all media.

Find Your True Purpose

What a different story people would have to tell if they would adopt a definite purpose and stand by that purpose until it had time to become an all-consuming purpose.  (emphasis mine)

Napoleon Hill
Laws of Success

I read a fantastic paper today by Bob Proctor on Vision, Purpose, and Goals.  and I’m not sure that I am allowed to redistribute the download so I’m going to tell you about it.  Bob Proctor is a motivational / success coach and I think he is great.  I have posted several times on this topic because it core to your success.  Here is Bob explaining it:

If you fail to determine your definite purpose, everything else is wrong.  It’s like working with a broken compass – you may think your going North, but you’re not.  You’re not sure which direction you’re heading, so, you’re just wandering aimlessly.

Without your purpose identified firmly in your mind, you will wander through life, never quite feeling that you’re “in the flow”.  I say, then, that it’s imperative you recognize what it is you’re good at – what it is you really love to do.  Your purpose in this lifetime is to do the thing that you love.

Here is the rest of my summary in PDF format:

Find Your True Purpose

Previous posts you should read:

Find Happiness Outside the Rat Race

What is the ONE THING in Your Life?

Doing What Matters to You Now

Stephen

You can accomplish your most essential goals and make amazing improvements in your life if you will suspend your disbelief for a short period of time.  When I first ran across the ideas that follow, I was extremely skeptical.  I thought it was impossible to implement this stuff.  It was pie in the sky philosophizing.  My job responsibilities just wouldn’t allow it and there were too many obligations in my personal life.   I filled my head with reasons why this couldn’t work.  But it has and it is continuing to work.  Give it a chance.

I learned these ideas from Leo Babauta and I’ve added my own flavor to them.

Identify the Essential

1. List of all the areas that you consider essential in your work and life.  You can do one list for work and a separate list for your personal life if you wish.
2. Obviously you could make the categories so broad as to include everything, but then you would be cheating and undercutting your own success.  Things like "Spend quality time with my spouse" is a category that is about right.  "Work on Personal Development" might be another.  "Focus on only two projects at work" might be another.  The narrower and more defined each category, the more success you will have.  Otherwise you are just watering down the impact.
3. Now cut that list down to a maximum of six combined for both work and your personal life.  Ideally get to four, but if you must you may keep six.  This might be hard but just do it.  Everything in your life can’t be essential.  You just think it is right now.  Suspend your disbelief and give it a chance to work and you will be amazed at the results.

Eliminate the Rest

Huh?  You can’t eliminate all the other stuff can you?  Oh yes you can, and it is an incredibly freeing experience when you do it.  Leo expands on ways to do this in his book.  I will be posting some additional information this week as well. 

1. If you want to accomplish the essential, you simply must eliminate the rest.  Otherwise they will distract you into chaos.
2. You need to make a very important decision in your life.  Sit down and ask yourself the following question.  "Am I going to do what is important and essential in my life or am I going to continue to water down those precious areas with the trivial and the not so important?"
3. A common tactic to help with this is to ask yourself the following question all day long every day.  "At this point in time, out of everything I could be doing, is this the very most important one to be working on?"  If the answer to that question is no, then why are you doing it?  When I started using this method, it was a shocking and eye-opening experience.  I realized how habits had taken me away from what is important and into the trivial.  I think you will have the same experience.

Let me know what you think about this article and if there is anything I can to help you.

Stephen.

Unless you want to be caught in the claws and jaws of the rat race predators, you need to pay careful attention to what follows.  When you look up toward the sky, you will see a large kettle (group) of vultures circling overhead and the hawks and wolves lurk near you in the trees and bushes.  They are waiting for you to take a step outside where they can gobble you up.

When you decide to follow your dream and escape the rat race, you are vulnerable.  You are going to see so many get-rich-quick schemes and scams flying in your direction you won’t know which direction is up.  These will be presented in very convincing presentations, using tried and true marketing techniques, wrapped inside the most powerful testimonials from the allegedly new rich.  There is no way you can lose right?  All the money you ever wanted is just around the corner and all you have to do is reach out and grab it.

It simply doesn’t work that way.  Yes you can achieve your dreams.  Yes you can be happy and successful.  Yes you can earn more than you ever have before.  No it is not easy.  No it is not quick.  And no it does not come without a price.  If you want something and are not willing to pay the price to get it, you are going to end up very disappointed.  I am not going to link you to dozens of sites promising rivers of money will soon flow your way.  You need to learn the principles that will sustain you over the long-term.  I want you to be part of this community for the long term and so I am going to earn your trust.

There are two strategies you can follow right now to achieve your escape.
The first is to make major changes in your current life situation and the second is to change careers and do something entirely different with your life.  You must apply the first strategy regardless and the second one around career change will also be used by many people.  However you do not have to use the second strategy.  Many people won’t and will still benefit enormously.  The whole point of this article is to convince you to make this decision carefully and deliberately.

The first strategy detailed below is very important as it will sustain you during your escape and for the rest of your life no matter what you decide in regards to career change.  Please don’t rush into that decision or you will find yourself in a heap of trouble.  I will post some information in the next few days on some resources you can begin looking into if you feel a change is necessary right now.  I suggest that you get your life in order first and then you will have the necessary foundation to make a very successful career change later.

Make life changes now, no matter what your current situation.

There are very few people who won’t benefit tremendously from some major changes in the way they approach their personal and professional lives.  Make these changes now and continue to grow positively, and you almost certainly will find happiness and success in your current job or business.  You will benefit from these changes for the rest of your life.

I will continue to provide a lot of content in this blog to help you achieve these changes.  They are remarkably straightforward if you know what to do.  Here are some resources to help you get started.

• Follow the steps to finding happiness that were described in the Find Happiness Outside of the Rat Race series.  Here is a great article from Zen Habits: First Your Feelings: Then Your Action Plan.  This article from Goodlife Zen is also very good: What is the ONE Thing in Your Life
• Check out Derek’s Success Tips.
• Drink in everything Leo Babauta.  I realize I’m bordering on hero worship,  but I simply think the guy is fantastic.  Here is his book: Power of Less, The: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential…in Business and in Life by Leo Babauta. Here is his web site: Zen Habits
• Continue to participate in The Rat Race Trap community.  I am committed to doing everything possible to help you get that great life you deserve.  There is so much more to come and I can hardly wait to put it out there for you.  We can all help each other here by actively participating in the comments and getting discussion threads going.
• Review the Must Read and Killer categories to your right in the link sidebar.  You will find a lot of good information there now and it will continue to grow rapidly as the site content builds.  Some of those articles were mentioned above.
• Get your finances in order.  You must at least be financially stable before you make any major changes.  Stable finances are a key to long-term success and you must start right now.  The following link is to a nice blog on personal finances, and there is a ton of content.  You probably will have to browse around to find exactly what you want but it is a great resource  Here is the link to the basics category of Get Rich Slowly.    There are a million articles on the Internet and so just start Googling personal finances.  You can expect a lot of future content here on this blog around financial success in the future.  Here are a couple of starter articles to get you going:
  • http://www.surfersam.com/articles/personal-finance-plan.htm
  • http://www.muzi.com/library/ar/english/122502.shtml

Much, much, more to come.  Please let me know what you think.

Stephen.

T

his post marks the conclusion of the series and will help you understand why it is so important you discover your core needs and find that happiness you deserve. Consider the following.  Suppose one of your core needs is alone time.  That wouldn’t be surprising because I think it is a need for many people.  However you simply don’t have enough alone time for everything and your alone time is the easiest thing to give up.  You are a mother, a career woman, a wife, and a community volunteer.  There is no way you would spend less time with your children in order to have more time alone.  Is that really a good decision?  I believe it is not.  Far more important than the quantity of time you spend with your family is the quality of that time.  Running around tired, stressed, impatient, cranky, or whatever is not what your family needs.

Whatever you give up in core needs, makes you less of who you really are and could be.  Your children will remember a mother who was not filled with the joy of life, with the calm and loving manner, and with the fulfilled life that should should have been.  You are giving your children something less and not something more by sacrificing a core need.

The same thing applies to your role as partner, and employee, a friend, or any other role you have.  You are giving all of that less, because you gave yourself less.

Y

ou may also discover that you have one or more core needs that you are not proud to have.  It does no good to stick your head in the sand and pretend like they do not exist.  It is likely the reason you are not happy with having that core need is due to the fact that the means and structures by which you have been fulfilling it are not things you are proud to have done.  What you need to do, and what this method allows you to do, is to find other more acceptable to you ways to fulfill that need.  Do not deny or repress something that exists.  It will come out in ways that you will find harmful.  You need to accept it and find other outlets to fulfill it.

I

f you have not read the first and second parts of How to Find Happiness Outside the Rat Race please do so.  As indicated in the previous posts in this series, the method presented is based upon Richard Brodie’s  Getting Past Ok: A Straightforward Guide to Having a Fantastic Life. I highly recommend this $10 book.  If you apply what you have learned you can make a enormous change for the better for yourself and everyone connected to you.  This type of improvement is easy to ignore.  There is always something that is more urgent.  But ask yourself, what could be more important?

Please comment and let me know if I can help you in any way.

Free From the Rat Race Trap

Another important way to make time for your dreams is to reduce your commitments.  You don’t have to eliminate them and you can still volunteer, help, contribute, or whatever you want.  The important point is don’t be committed to do so. You can help with your daughter’s soccer team but don’t commit to be a coach.  You can volunteer, but don’t commit to a specific schedule.  You can be involved at school but don’t commit to x hours per week at a specific time.  You need to retain the freedom and flexibility to contribute when you are available and work on your dream life and be committed to doing that when it is necessary.

Commit to your new great life.  Once you realize your dreams you will have more time and more resources to give back.  Commit to your family, your children, to being happy.  Don’t worry about the disappointment of others.  It may be hard, but to achieve your dreams you have to take this step.  Realize that the disappointment will sometimes represent others’ selfish disappointment that you are no longer committed to them or their pet project.

Steps to Reducing Your Commitments

• Start slow – Free yourself from one commitment per month, then one per week.
• Start small – Don’t tackle the most entangled or most difficult commitments until you have won the battle with the smaller and easier targets.
• Learn how to say no – Don’t add any new commitments.

You cannot possibly escape the rat race and follow your dreams, unless you make time available to actually do those things necessary to achieve your dream life.  This seems obvious, but most people are so busy running the rat race that they don’t have time to even think about how to do anything else.  I was one of those people. 

1440 minutes

That’s how many minutes you have every day.  No matter what you do you will never add 1 single minute to that number.  Every minute that ticks by is lost forever.  You cannot go back.  What are you doing with your precious minutes?  They are the most valuable resource you have now or will ever have.  Don’t waste another minute. 

Evaluate everything you do and make sure you are doing things that take you closer to your dreams.  If not then eliminate that activity and replace it with something that does.

Time is Life

I started treating my minutes with the respect they deserve the day the following thought hit me in the face like a ton of bricks.  It occurred to me that my time is actually my life.  I realized I was not wasting "time".  I was wasting my life.  It’s a depressing thought, but the most powerful motivator I have ever used to stop doing useless life-wasting activities.

What can you do?

Here are several significant things you can do right now.  There are many more and I will cover some of them in detail in separate articles.

1. Each day set aside a small amount of time to come up with more ways to free even more time.
2. Stop Watching TV Immediately – I shudder to think how much of my life has been wasted in front of this electronic junk box.  I watch a couple of of sitcoms and that is it.  The laughter I experience is good for me.  If you have the will power, reduce your watching time 80% starting today.  IF you want to truly succeed, every minute you spend not watching TV is a minute added to the time you can allocate to getting what you want.  If you are unable to take such a dramatic cold-turkey step then reduce it 30 minutes daily for one week.  Then another 30 the next week.  And so on until you are down to 30 minutes or less each day.
3. Cut Down Your Working Day – Make a commitment to 10 hours or less at the office each day.  Be bold and go for 8, 6, or even 4 if you can get away with it.  If your work isn’t your ultimate dream, then what are you gaining by putting in 12, 15, or 16 hour days?  Think about it.  I finally did.
4. Stop listening, watching, or reading the news media.  It’s interesting sometimes but it too is mostly junk.  Even if it is not, is it more important than an activity that will take you closer to your dream?  I would guess not unless reading the news media is somehow directly related to what you want to do.  Remember you only have 1440 minutes  Your goal is to spend your time doing those things that are are most valuable, not everything that has some value.

If you start doing these 4 simple steps you will be absolutely amazed at how much time suddenly becomes available.