Run, don’t walk, toward your dreams

Sometimes the only way over the wall is to run straight at it.

Years ago, I took a parkour class for a magazine article I was writing.

And that lesson has stayed with me forever.

My instructor told me that if you want to do something impossible, if you want to scale a wall, you have to run at it—no hesitation, no fear.

I feel the same way about chasing your dreams.

This weekend, I gave myself 48 hours to do something I could’ve taken years to do.

I drafted a screenplay almost overnight to meet a contest deadline that just came across my radar. Of course it helped that it was for a story I’ve been working on for years now and had mostly figured out.

Still, I don’t know if they’ll pick me. I’m sure it’s a long shot.

But what I do know is that the 48-hour deadline forced me to stop thinking about doing it and actually do it.

And now I have something I can continue to refine, workshop and pitch.

One of my favourite success stories is that of Nia Vardalos. She wrote a screenplay but had no one to send it to so she turned it into a one woman play that she performed on stage. Eventually, she scraped together enough savings to buy an ad for the play in the local newspaper. It just so happened that Tom Hanks‘s wife Rita Wilson, who is also Greek, had just come back from New York, where she had fallen in love with the theatre scene. She promised her husband that they would see more shows when they were back home in LA. The next morning she opened the newspaper to see Nia‘s hard won ad for her play My Big Fat Greek Wedding—and the rest, as they say, is history.

As Nia’s story shows, it sure can pay off to bet on yourself, even when the odds are against you. You might even find that God has beat you to it and made a way for you there.

Also a little bit of pressure can be very, very good.

So run—don’t walk—toward your dreams.

Cat xo