No Dream(er) Left Behind

Top photo via Milan Popovic / Unsplash

We brush our dreams off the table as being impossible and then we say, ‘I see no dreams here.’ But there has never been a dream that you can’t have - not the heart of it, the part you love most.

Barbara Sher

Free Booklet (PDF) By Barbara Sher

How To Get What You Really Want (even if you have no goals, no character, and you’re often in a lousy mood.)

The part of your brain that loves things is not the part of your brain that figures out how to get them. The two processes are completely different. So if you’re thinking, “I’d love to be an artist but I’m too old to start, I’m not sure I’m any good, and I don’t want to live in a garret,” your brain has gone into gridlock and your heart is lost in a traffic jam.

Barbara Sher

Video: Isolation is the dream-killer, not your attitude | Barbara Sher | TEDxPrague

(21 mins)

• I stood in rooms where they said, “Stand up and say ‘I can do it! I can do it!’” And I did that but I still couldn’t do it.

• The whole world makes you do what you HAVE to do - you have to pay your taxes, you have to show up. What if we made you do what you WANT to do? You could have your dream, you could have any dream. And we did it. And amazing things started to happen.

• You never know who you’re talking to. We are all the center of enormous amounts of information and connections that we don't need and we don't think of, unless somebody asks us.

• I began to realize that I had found the absolute guaranteed secret to success, and boy, did it have nothing to do with positive thinking.

• So here's what you do: You get a team, you figure out what you want, and then you say, "Here is my wish, and here is my obstacle. Here's what I want, and here is why I cannot have it." If you don't say both those things, nothing happens.

• We are problem-solving animals. If you say, “I’d love to be a ballerina,” everybody goes, “Mmm.” If you say, “I’d love to be a ballerina, but I’m 44 years old,” every mind starts working. Even if people don’t like you, they’ll solve your problem. People want to help. Amazing things will happen to you.

• We depend on each other’s dreams coming true. Every time you make someone else’s dream come true, it echoes. No magical New Age way, it echoes in practical, wonderful ways.

• You have to figure out what you want and you have to ask for help, and you have to remember “wishes and obstacles”. And you have to let people help you because you have to go after your dreams, and never tell me you can’t do it. We got Ronnie a great apartment in New York and a crazy woman he loves with all his heart. We can do anything.

Winning to me means getting what you want. Not what your father and mother wanted for you, not what you think you can realistically get in this world, but what you want — your wish, your fantasy, your dream.

As the bruised victim of every success book and program that ever promised me ten easy steps to self-esteem, self-discipline, will power, or a positive attitude, I know what I’m talking about when I say this book is different.

Can you persevere? I can’t.

Barbara Sher (Wishcraft: How to Get What You Really Want) free 1979 PDF from her or 1986 paperback from amazon

Book: Teamworks: Building Support Groups That Guarantee Success (1989)

1989 hardcover amazon or 1991 paperback amazon or Internet Archive

• A Success Team is a small group of people whose only goal is to help every member of the team get what he or she wants.

• I called a few friends who I knew had been struggling along the same way and got them all together in my living room. I said, “Look. I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll help you do what you want to do if you will make me do what I want to do. I don’t want you to leave it up to me to do what I want to do, because I won’t do it!” So we started meeting every week. We gave each other inspiration, practical help, and support. I had ideas for them when they ran dry. They had guts for me when mine failed. And by God, it worked.

• A Success Team is completely different from any other kind of team you’ve ever been on before. A Success Team’s goal is to have everyone pull together to reach a target inside the team: to make sure that each member gets his or her personal goal.

• So to fulfill your dream, you don’t have to become one of those rare people (so rare I’ve never met one) who never feel defeated. You can go toward your beloved goal the same way you go on living day to day - good and bad, slow and fast, terrific and lousy, cheerful and peppy, sloppy and sleepy. Continuity of structure, continuity of support - not attitude or character - is the key to keeping going, and keeping going is the major secret of getting there.

• The most successful, long-lasting Success Teams have four or five members.

  Owen Parachute: Quad powa!

• Are they motivated toward action and life change? (They don’t have to be super hot-shot go-getters. They do have to be ready to move.) Are they in transition?

• Almost any four or five interested people can become a team - and once you are a working team, you’ll probably be convinced that by some act of Providence, you’ve found the perfect teammates! This happens because Success Teams tap into the part of people that’s both most universal and most individual - the part that hopes and dreams, imagines and creates.

• Acquaintances are, in many ways, the best group of people to draw your team from. You don’t share established habits or emotional entanglements; there’s a kind of refreshing objectivity to your relationship, and the possibilities are wide open. Emphasize the ways that you differ, and you’ll have more resources to bring to bear on problem-solving.

• A Success Team is not a bunch of buddies sitting around having coffee. We’re using hardheaded business methods to achieve personal dreams - and they only work if you’re businesslike about them. A Success Team isn’t an emotional support or socialising group.

Who you really are only has a chance to fully appear when the youthful stuff finally abandons you - though it’s our nature to clutch and claw to hang on to it (because we believe that what comes after is awful). The truth is, your first life belongs to nature. Your second life belongs to you. That’s when you finally give up trying to win the popularity/success contest and the genius inside you finally has a chance to show its stuff. You know those toys we laid down when adolescence began (and we became a soldier in nature’s reproduction/species survival army)? Well, now you get to pick them up again. And this time you don’t have to ask anyone’s permission. But the years between 40 and 55 can be awful unless you understand how great things will get.

Barbara Sher (Just turned 50; youthful dreams exhausted/found wanting)

More Of Barbara Sher’s Books

• I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was: How to Discover What You Really Want and How to Get It (1995) amazon

• Live the Life You Love: In Ten Easy Step-By Step Lessons (1997) amazon

• It’s Only Too Late If You Don’t Start Now: HOW TO CREATE YOUR SECOND LIFE AT ANY AGE (1999) amazon

• Barbara Sher’s Idea Book - How to Discover What You Really Want (Even if You Have No Clue (2004) US$20 PDF from her or amazon

• Refuse to Choose!: Use All of Your Interests, Passions, and Hobbies to Create the Life and Career of Your Dreams (2007) amazon

• The Best Advice I Ever Gave: 94 essential tips for making your dreams come true (2017) amazon

Not many people understand that when you love doing something – anything at all – it’s a clue to your genetic abilities.

Everything you list that you sincerely enjoy is scientific data, because pleasure is a telegram from talent and it has an important message in it.

Barbara Sher (What you love is a message from your DNA)

Barbara Sher Online (Some Of It)

• Website: SherSuccessTeams

• Website: Barbara Sher’s Official Website

• Website: Barbara’s Club

• YouTube Channel: BarbaraSherWishcraft

• YouTube Channel: Barbara Sher

• Facebook Biz Page: BarbaraSherAuthor

• Facebook Person: Barbara Sher

Video: Barbara Sher’s Absolute Guaranteed Secret to Success

(10 mins)

• You are here to learn the absolute, guaranteed 100%, secret to success because I’ve got it. I know Tony Robbins says he has it, he does not. Marianne Williamson doesn’t have it. Deepak Chopra doesn’t have it. They don’t have it, I got it and you’re gonna learn it tonight.

• This stuff about building character is so dangerous. I do know what will help you get what you want. I know the secret to success. It's just got nothing to do with positive thinking because there was never a project that lasted as short as one mood. There's never been a mood that's lasted as long as any project.

• Human beings do not say, “I can be all I want and have enormous amounts of power inside me.”

• A human being is somebody who does two kinds of things - the kinds of things that raise anxiety and the kinds of things that lower anxiety.

• Nature does not want you to do things that feel dangerous to you.

• We were designed to eat anything that didn’t eat us first and if your ancestors weren’t like that you wouldn’t be here.

• So here are all these things that lower anxiety and need no help and then there are the things that raise anxiety and for those they’ve given us, “Believe you can do it.”

• As long as you’re thinking about how lovable you are, you are not thinking about what you need to be thinking about and all that genius inside you is saying, “Glad you like yourself, cut it out, wake us when it’s over.”

If you think things slow down and the party’s over at around 40, listen up: Your first life belongs to nature. Your second life belongs to you.

Barbara Sher

Video: Barbara Sher - Saving Geniuses - Trailer to the 2018 Documentary

(3 mins)

• Your wishes are like a hundred little kids all trying to get through a door at the same time - they can’t all get through but if they line up they can get through.

• I figure you got enough time to make your hair look good or to write a book.

• The book in English is called “It’s Only Too Late If You Don’t Start Now : How to Create Your Second Life After Forty.” I really meant “After Fifty” but nobody will buy a book like that in America.

• People say, “I’m over 50,” and I say, “It was written for you, don’t worry.”

• And then, of course, 30-year-olds started calling in and saying, “This book was written for me because this is the first time I haven’t been afraid to get older.”

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