Irrefutable Success

It began with a dream.

Now, when I say “dream,” I’m not talk­ing about a grand aspi­ra­tion or auda­cious hope. I mean, I was lit­er­ally asleep, and I had a dream. When I woke up, I knew that there was some­thing spe­cial about this dream, and if I didn’t get up and jour­nal my thoughts, I would for­get all about it.

The prob­lem was, I didn’t want to get up. I just wanted to stay in my warm bed. Boy, I am so glad I didn’t…

The dream I had that night became the inspi­ra­tion for my lat­est book, The Street Sweeper.   (You can order a signed copy right here on my blog.)  Writ­ing and pub­lish­ing the book has already been an excit­ing adven­ture, but even then I had no idea what else was in store.

A few months ago, I was speak­ing with my pub­lisher. Imag­ine my sur­prise when he told me that he had given a copy of The Street Sweeper to the owner of a film company!

A few days later I spoke with this woman, who had already read the book and had given a copy to her busi­ness part­ner in Lon­don. Upon read­ing it, he com­mented that they should con­sider replac­ing their upcom­ing project with The Street Sweeper.

I quickly real­ized that I had a lot of work to do. I needed to do some research and make some quick deci­sions. Two weeks ago I met with the owner and, to make a long story short, I am sign­ing the option agree­ment today.

The past cou­ple of months have felt like a wind­storm. I can’t say for sure exactly when – or even if – this lit­tle movie project will get off the ground. I don’t know enough about the movie indus­try to esti­mate the box office poten­tial of The Street Sweeper.

But there’s one thing I do know: I’m so glad I got out of bed and cap­tured my ideas in my jour­nal that fate­ful morning!

Have you ever had a thought or an idea that you needed to retain, but you just didn’t take the time to do it? Have you ever had a dream, but you just didn’t take that first step?

For me, the first step was get­ting out of bed that day to jour­nal my thoughts. Of course, at the time I didn’t know how far it would take me.

Do you have a way to cap­ture your ideas?

Per­son­ally, I am par­tial to the Mole­sk­ine jour­nal with a Lev­enger Soul Skin cover.  It’s what I’ve been using for years.

But of course, it doesn’t really mat­ter what you use. The most impor­tant thing is that you prac­tice the daily dis­ci­pline of journaling.

Take time to jour­nal your thoughts. Who knows where it could take you?

Related posts:

1. So You Want to Write a Book?

Tags: Books, Discipline, Dreams, Journaling, The Street Sweeper, Writing

This entry was posted on Friday, February 4th, 2011 at 9:44 am and is filed under Self-Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.