DREAM AT THE TOP

There was a time when I got it all.

The success.
The money.
The house.
The car.
The solutions.
The progress.
The body.

All. Of. It.

What I didn’t foresee, was what happens after you get to the mountain top.

Now, let’s rewind…

Before I got the goods, imagination was how I built it all, top to bottom. My inner world was just as vivid and vibrant as my real life. I knew exactly what I wanted and nurtured my vision every single day.

I know it’s controversial, but at the time I wasn’t working all that much either. I certainly wasn’t busting my ass to make things happen the way I had many times previously. Further, this was during a season when I had backed off content creation almost entirely, and if you had asked me at the time, I would have told you I was failing often.

You know the whole “eating stacks of failure for breakfast” thing?

Yeah… that. 🥞

Despite my self proclaimed failures, I kept nurturing my inner world, appreciating my outer world, and taking the steps I was called to each day.

What I was aiming at felt like a tall order, but every time I felt boredom or doubt, I would reinvigorate myself by looking up lavish things and telling myself they were no big deal. I would scroll through Zillow listings and treat the $65,000,000 Montecito estate like it was one of the many options available to me.

I asked myself things like: how large of a staff I would need in order to maintain the property? Do I want an edible garden, or a flower garden for cutting and never ending bouquets filled with 7 different varieties of heirloom roses?

How large was the garage? I have 3 cars in mind at the moment, but how many does my man want?

*texts him immediately*

From the outside looking in, it would have looked like a waste of time, but it was strategic. When I would spend time looking at something way, way above and beyond what I was asking for, when I re-focused on my desire, it looked like peanuts! It’s like a self induced optical illusion.

After all, someone will buy that $65,000,000 estate in Montecito… so why not you or me?

I suggest you not be so quick to count yourself out of big audacious things when you’re connected to a God that will happily provide anything you commit yourself to.

As it turned out… all my imaginal acts paid off tenfold.

My desires flooded in one right after the other in the most astonishing ways, but that’s not the point of our conversation today…

You see, once I “got it all” or rather, as much as I could imagine at the time, I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life.

I stopped imagining.

When I got to that mountain peak, my focus shifted from dreaming big, finding the next mountain to climb, reaching for the next outlandish desire, to… maintaining what I already created.

Instead of asking where and how I could go bigger, I started focusing on “how can I not lose what I created?”

That’s when everything went sideways.

I became emotionally brittle.
I was full of fear.
I felt risk averse (very unusual for me).
I started to avoid my own life.
Things I once looked forward to suddenly felt heavy.

My life was completely drained of fun.

What I now realize about success, is that our biggest challenge isn’t climbing out of a shitty circumstance… but to stand on the peak of your own success and reach for an even bigger dream.

Having massive success while staying available for more…
Keeping your imagination stimulated and productive even at the top…
Hell, even being clear and connected to your honest desires…

It’s all a skill. As crazy as it sounds, dreaming at the top can often feel more difficult than our familiar struggles.

It’s my favorite quote for a reason: “you’re either green and growing or ripe and rotten.”

In this case, you’re either dreaming big or your imagination will start being mishandled.

You’ll manufacture small crises that need solving.
You’ll stop focusing on funding your big dreams and instead you’ll stress about having enough to pay XYZ bill.
You’ll have an existential crisis when you realize even at the peak, you must keep dreaming.

For many people, it feels… wrong to keep creating and reaching for the next dream when you’ve had big successes.

But the thing is, you don’t really have a choice.

“Maintaining” this level of success is still just a way of using your imagination, and I promise, maintenance or digging yourself out of a small crises is not nearly as pleasurable as playing full out with your life.

Let me put it another way, God isn’t residing in the maintenance zone of your life - and as we know, to squeeze all the juice out of life, you want to stay up to speed with God.

God is over there with all your desires - the big ones!

God isn’t dwelling in your feast and famine dramas, or the lukewarm desires, or the shrinking violet attitude toward your own life!

That’s why it feels so sour over there.

Unplugging from your imagination is the same thing as unplugging from God.
Denying, rejecting, or downplaying your unique dreams is the same thing as rejecting God’s promises.
Shrinking your vision at the mountain top is like cutting yourself off from your nonstop stream of customized blessings.

Your imagination is life-giving.

I would argue it’s the most important spiritual faculty you have. I would also argue that imagination is misunderstood, mishandled, often neglected, and nowhere near used to its full capacity.

My point here is, at some point you have to choose. Are you going to continue dreaming at the top, or let your blessings dry up before you start imagining again?