New Affiliate Discoveries

This is the fourth article in a series on How to turn your Great Ideas into Reality. In the first three, we brainstormed a list of your great ideas, evaluated their overall importance in your life, and looked inside yourself to find if you had passion for your ideas. In this article, we’ll think about the bigger picture of your life and where these ideas fit in.

Every once in awhile, you get an idea that seems like it’s completely from outer space. It happened to me when I was 27 years old. I had the idea of returning to school for advanced healthcare training. “Where did that thought come from?” I wondered. The idea seemed to come from nowhere. It seemed to fall into my brain like a missing piece of a puzzle.

How did this fit in to the bigger picture?

At that time, I was tutoring math, teaching climbing classes, and working part time in a retail store. Where did this idea of going back to school come from?

I had to step back and look at the bigger picture. What did I want to be doing in one year? Five years? Ten or twenty? I wanted a skill that I could use to help those in developing countries. I had considered volunteering for the peace core, or for overseas medical missions trips, but I didn’t feel that I had any skills to offer…except for teaching algebra…but that didn’t excite me too much.

So while at that time the idea of going back to school seemed far fetched, somehow I understood that it did fit into a bigger picture in my life that was still taking shape.

I had a choice to make.

I could pursue the idea, which meant cutting back on my job(s), applying to school and going to summer classes, or I could continue doing what I was doing, which frankly wasn’t getting me very far or earning me very much money. Most importantly, it was unsatisfying.

The bigger picture of my life required me to make radical changes, and it was all initiated by this one crazy idea to go back to school. That was ten years ago, and I’ve since traveled to Honduras to teach and work with nursing & medical students, bringing health care to rural villages. I hope that over the next ten years I can make that a nearly full time devotion.

So the next time you get a Great Crazy Idea, don’t discard it without looking at it more closely.

Action Step:

Over the past few lessons we’ve taken your brainstorming list of Great Ideas, ranked them by Importance, and examined your passion for each one. You should now be down to a list of one to five Great Ideas, which are very passionate about and are of significant importance in your life.

I want you to get a new blank sheet of paper for each great idea, and write the idea at the top of each page. Draw a line underneath the Great Idea. On the rest of the page, sketch some free-form ideas, either in words, pictures or time-lines, that demonstrates how this Great Idea fits into the bigger picture. Maybe it’s a stepping stone, maybe it’s the end goal, maybe it’s an idea in a direction that you’ve never headed before.

Don’t be afraid of the end result, it will take some great ideas to get you from here to there!

Previous posts in this series:

Part 1: Turning Your Great Ideas into Reality
Part 2: How Important is this Dream?

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Filed under: Affiliate Marketing by adventurebear