The future is calling. Answer it.

​I spent a lot of my life waiting on a future to come clean up some of the messes in my life. Turns out, a lot of the messes in my life have been created by my messy vision of the future.

When you're waiting on your future, you're not living out a life you see for that future. You're letting the future call the shots of your life and not living a life that calls the shots of your future. You spend your days wrestling with all the impossibilities of the future and not living out all the possibilities right in front of you.

I think of my writing when I think of the evidence of my own personal mindset shift.

I have always had a passion for writing. Even when I wasn't writing I always felt like I was supposed to be. There was a constant tension in my life; I now think of that tension as not answering a call from my future that I was supposed to be answering.

Like a phone that just wouldn't stop ringing.

Instead of answering it, I was telling myself I don't have time. I was telling myself I don't have the skills. I was telling myself I am too old. I was telling myself I really can't be my true enough self to write the truths I want to write. The feelings I want to express.

Yet, inside all of those doubts, I lived with some sort of fading hope that the future would one day come along and lift me out of those doubts.

Well, today I'm a writer. I answer that phone call nearly every day. It wasn't my future that changed that. I changed that when I started living the future I was waiting on.

I changed that when I decided the future starts now, on my terms, not when some ill-defined future decides to show up.

I changed that when I decided to start living not based on what was or wasn't possible, but on the possibilities I was going to create for my life.

And continue to create.

Five years ago I never would have included 'writer' on my resume. Today, I'd likely put it first.

Why? Because some future came along that handed me the chance to be a writer?

No, because five years ago I decided to start living out a future as a writer.

I started writing my resume not waiting on it to write itself.

You have a choice today. Sit back and wait for life to write your resume, or start writing the resume you want to define your life.

The phone is ringing. Don't let it ring. Answer the call.