 I know about mistakes, and I know how difficult it is to bounce back from making mistakes. For many years in my life, I copied friends, I did what other people were doing, and allowed others to dictate what to do, and I was locked up for so long on the inside for it. Once, I spent five years studying a course I hated, because I had seen someone who succeeded financially having studied the same course. At the time, I didn't have anyone knock the foolishness out of me, that you don't do what others are doing. To do what your life is made to do, so many young people have made such mistakes with their lives too. For some, it seems they should just give up and forget about pursuing a good life ever again. But that's not entirely true. Even though I spent five years doing what I didn't love, those years weren't wasted. They taught me a crucial lesson about life. They taught me to own my life, take responsibility for it, and never believed the fallacy that it was over for me. If you're a young person struggling to get up now because of some past mistake, if you're a young person who is eager to move his life forward, if you feel you have made mistakes with your life, you feel nothing good could ever come out of it. Here are three easy things you can do today to get your life started again. 1. Dream. No matter how bad things have been, you still have the opportunity to dream. One of the excuses people make for not living their best life is that they have wasted their precious years or made mistakes. No, that's not true. Some young girls got pregnant, but still chose to pick their lives up to make something good out of it. The old statement is very true. It is not over until it's over. It is not over if you can still dream. However, it is over for the man who cannot dream. It is over for the man who cannot visualize a great future for himself and be eager to pursue that future. I told you the story of Mrs. Annie Johnson of Arkansas in Chicken Soup for the Soul by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen. In 1903, Mrs. Annie found herself with two tumbling sons, very little money, and a slight ability to read and add simple numbers. Worse still, she carried the burden of the disastrous marriage and the fact that she was a Negro. She left her husband and was left broke. She looked up the road she was going and back the way she had come. Since she wasn't satisfied, she decided to step off the road and cut herself a new path. She wasn't a fancy cook, but she could mix groceries enough to scare hunger away from a starving man. The first day, she worked into the night, making meat pies and frying hams. The next morning, she walked five miles to a cotton gene where lay workers worked, soon as they smelled her meat pie and pork. They came to her. She sold her meat pie and ham to factory workers at the town's cotton gene and lumber mill, where both factories are miles apart. She did this consistently until she became widely known there and succeeded just showing up to sell meat pie and hams. She could have been ashamed of herself and her situation. She could have been ashamed of pushing her cart to Dills factories each morning to sell her wares. She could have looked for a more sophisticated job or business, so she would look posh and sleek. But she didn't. Instead, she understood her impoverished situation, swallowed her pride, and did what she could to get her life back together. It is never too late to rediscover your dream. In fact, because you are young, you have no excuse not rediscovering your vision. Poet James Langston Hughes wrote, Hold fast to dreams. For when dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly. Hold fast to dreams. For when dreams go, life is a bearing filled, frozen with snow. The only thing that keeps a man alive, filled with joy and fulfilled each day when he wakes up is the hope of a more significant thing to achieve. Dreams are the fill for enthusiasm and fulfillment. What is that dream you used to have? It's never too late to rediscover and to begin again to pursue it. 2. Plan It's great to dream, but dreaming without planning on how you will achieve your dream is a waste of time. I could dream of writing the best book ever written. If I don't plan on how I'm going to write the book, I will never get the dream achieved. Someone said, it's okay to dream as long as you wake up to make it a reality. If your dream of starting your own business, how will you begin to build it? If you aspire to write your own books, how do you plan to start writing them? What strategies are you going to put in place to achieve your dream? It is said that a goal is a dream with a deadline. What goals are you going to put in place so you can become that person you want to be? Planning actually takes the dream off your head and helps you draw it on paper so you can know the direction and steps you must take to achieve that dream. Don't ever believe the fallacy that anyone who ever achieved their dream is better than you. If you plan to write great novels, don't ever imagine that Stephen King or JK Rowling ate some special meal before they could write most of their best sellers are successful people have something in common. They believe they can do it and go ahead to do it. They believe so much in themselves that nothing can stop them. Make your plans about how you will achieve your dreams because plans are the building blocks for climbing all the way to the top where your vision is waiting to become a reality. If you must build castles in the air, you must be willing to erect the support for it. 3. Do. Most people do not pursue their dreams because they do not believe in themselves. Believing in yourself is very vital in achieving your goal. Successful people, as I wrote on point 2, realize their dreams not because they are smarter or more intelligent, but because they believe in themselves. Albert Einstein is reputed to have said, I am not a genius, I just stay with problems much longer. When you meet them, you realize the successful people are just as ordinary as you are. They are ordinary people who choose to believe something extraordinary about themselves and then stand up to pursue it. Whether you want to believe it or not, just like you, they had doubts before and when they started out and up until this moment. They still deal with uncertainty sometimes, but successful people have learned to do something about their self-doubts. They act despite it. You don't have to wait to be sure if you can become your dream or not. The first ingredient for success is to believe you can do it and know that nothing will ever stop you from doing it. I didn't feel like writing the script for this video. It's a minute past 5 am and I haven't been feeling too well, but regardless, I knew I had vowed to always write very early in the morning like this. Even though my head ached and my eyes were bulging, I still sat before my writing device and started to tie boards out. We don't become what we want to be by wishing, we become what we want to be by doing. Don't just dream, plan and stand up to pursue your dream and be persistent. Because goals are achieved only by persistence, I know you have probably heard this before. But sometimes, we all need reminders that we should get our lives together and follow our dreams. I hope this video helped you. Don't give up on your life, find and discover your dream, plan how you will achieve it, then stand up to pursue your dream without giving up. If this video inspired you, like the video, we love you.