Imagine That

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on when and where you're tuning in.  Thank you for listening to episode eight of The Blue Collar Executive podcast.  I am your host Lewis Taulbee, Jr.  Albert Einstein once said imagination is everything.  It is the preview to life's coming attractions.  I want to delve into that a little more today.  You may say I'm a dreamer, but I bet I'm not the only one.  As I reflect on my life, I realize that every success I've had was first in my imagination.  The first big milestone I remember was turning 16 and getting my driver's license.  I couldn't wait to get behind the steering wheel and throttle that car down the road.  For years leading up to that, I had already driven millions of miles, either on my knees pushing a hot wheel car around the house, or gazing out the window envisioning I had control of that vehicle as it went down the road.  Every job I've ever had, I envisioned myself working there before I even applied.  I believe in love at first sight because from the first moment I laid eyes on my beautiful wife I was having dreams of marrying her for a year before we even had our first date.  Everything in our lives begins in our imaginations, dreams and visions.  Unfortunately, we fail to recognize them, or we just ignore them.  Think about everything we use today.  It all began in someone's imagination.  Someone got tired of lighting a candle to see at night and imagined just flipping a switch to light a bulb.  Someone got saddle sore from riding a horse too much and imagined sitting in a seat behind the steering wheel as a motor propelled them down the road.  Someone decided that it took too long to travel a far distance, looked up in the air and imagined flying through those clouds.  I could go on and on about everything we have, but if you really think about it, everything we use today began in someone's imagination.  Thankfully everyone that had these dreams had the determination to see them through and didn't allow anyone to discourage them.  Think about how crazy it probably sounded to friends and family when Thomas Edison told them he was imagining being able to pick up a telephone and talk to someone on the other side of the world.  Well, it wasn't crazy to Tom because he could see it clearly in his visions.  Reality is perception.  What we know to be true in our minds is reality to us.  To others who don't have that same vision, it's not reality.  In fact, it may seem crazy to them.  Thankfully, there are people that believe in their visions and pursue them without allowing anyone to deflate them.  Let me ask you a question and really think about this.  Was the world flat before we knew it was round?  It was to everyone except Christopher Columbus.  Think about when he told friends and family about his vision.  I bet he was the joke of the town.  People probably saw him walking down the street and yelled here comes old Crazy Chrissy.  He believed in his imagination and followed through with it and now we all believe what only he had in his imagination.  God gave him that vision just like he gives us every thought we have in our imagination.  We are all given visions.  The difference is who acts on them.  Remember when God came to Abraham in a vision and told him that he was going to be the father of many nations?  Remember when Abraham told his wife, Sarah, and she laughed.  They were 99 years old and had no children.  Sarah's reaction was understandable, but Abraham didn't laugh and he claimed his vision.  Sarah wasn't laughing either when she became pregnant.  It doesn't matter how old we are because our imagination never ages.  If you're waking up in the morning, God is not done with you.  Never think your ability to catch your dreams is impossible.  If you can imagine it, you can achieve it.  Now notice I say, catch your dreams.  That's very important.  I'm a dreamer and always have been.  I struggled in high school because my mind was always somewhere else.  I've been criticized by friends and family for years for what they felt were crazy ideas.  If I'm being honest, they sometimes are farfetched and I could spend my entire life chasing them.  The key is you can't give up.  You have to keep the determination to catch them.  I have seen dreams die and I've personally experienced it because some small-minded person killed it before it was caught.  We were made to use our imaginations.  We were not just given everything.  God doesn't make tables and chairs.  He gives us trees and puts the rest in our imagination.  Beans and cornbread don't grow on trees.  I wish it did sometimes, but no God gives us bean seeds and grains.  He has given us every resource we need to cure every disease and to be as productive as possible on this Earth.  He puts the plans in our imagination and like I say in every podcast, the rest is up to us.  We can choose to do nothing or we can choose to go out and chase our dreams and make a mark in this world.  To quote Albert Einstein again he said, “imagination is more important than knowledge for knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand while imagination embraces the entire world and all there ever will be to know and understand”.  That sounds a lot like the verse in the Bible that says faith is the substance of things hoped for and the belief and things unseen.  I strongly believe the greatest things we have are things we can't physically see such as love, emotions and imagination.  What old Albert was saying is that education and experience can actually be an obstacle for catching our dreams because the ways we are taught to do things is always based on the way it's been done in the past.  It takes someone to step outside that box and try something new to find a better way.  Remember when David stepped up to fight Goliath?  King Saul gave him a shield, sword, uniform, and said here, put all this on.  David tried it and said no, this is too heavy.  He pulled out his little slingshot.  Let's face it, given the size and strength difference, David would have definitely been overpowered with the sword.  Goliath had never seen that little slingshot before and because he didn't follow what was taught to the armies and used his own visions, he defeated them.  I am not saying education is not important.  I believe we should never stop learning.  I am saying that there is no university in this world that teaches us to listen to our hearts and pursue our dreams.  A big problem with our society is that kids graduate high school and they believe they need to go right into college.  The problem is most have no idea what they want to do.  And again, I'm not saying they shouldn't go to college.  I'm saying find your vision and then go get the necessary education to achieve that.  The majority of people today are in jobs that are not fulfilling their passion.  Most will spend their entire career there.  They got the degree and then needed the paycheck to pay off their student loans and then at some point they get trapped.  They feel it's all they know and they're afraid to change.  Fact is it's not all they know.  We all have passions and visions buried in our imaginations, but if we don't act on them at some point, then we will just be buried with them still in our imagination.  The world will never see those great visions that God gave us.  Charlie Chaplin once said, “imagination means nothing without doing”.  God is showing us a preview of what we can accomplish so don't ignore it.  Don't be afraid to give it a try and don't feed yourself the bull malarkey excuses that you don't have enough time or money.  We all have bills that need paid and we all have the exact same amount of minutes in a day.  Let me tell you a story about three bricklayers, all working side-by-side laying the same bricks, working on the same project.  Someone asked the first one, what are you doing?  He replied, I'm laying bricks.  Then they asked the second brick layer, what are you doing?  He said I'm earning a lousy $12 an hour.  Then they asked the third brick layer, what are you doing?  He smiled and said I'm building a beautiful cathedral.  See which one of those were fulfilling their vision?  They were all doing the exact same job.  The first one couldn't see past the bricks in front of him.  The other one was just there for the paycheck, but the third had a passion for what he was doing because he could see the vision.  The other two should go find something that's more fulfilling for them.  One last Einstein quote.  “Logic will get you from A to Z.  Imagination will get you everywhere.”  Thank God for your imagination and your dreams.  Thank God for the time and the ability you have to chase them.  Then thank God for the rewards once you catch them.  I'll leave you with a great quote that J. M. Barrie wrote for Peter Pan.  The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to.  That concludes another episode of The Blue Collar Executive podcast.  I hope you found some value in it or at the very least found it entertaining.  Thank you so much for listening.