How High The Bar?
Do dreams come true? You know, those dreams about what your life might be like. Can they come true? Even if you set your bar really high, can they still come true? Ha. Life doesn’t acknowledge high bars and low bars. There are those who barely lift a finger and go far beyond their wildest dreams. Then there are those of us who bust our butts all our lives and maybe touch our dreams one time… what’s that about??
Well, I don’t know what that’s about, and I don’t understand how some can set the bar low, barely making it, while others can set their bar ridiculously high and still clear it, way up to the stars. I know that there are these elements called luck, good fortune, good karma, and timing… even being crazy talented, good looking, magnetic, etc. Knowing when to sail with the tide, being ready when opportunity knocks, or about simply taking a “devil may care” attitude toward life in the first place, doing what feels right and letting it come to you.
Now that last one is tricky, because –
1. it assumes you don’t take your life too seriously, and most of us never get to that point.
2. You have to have a lot of self confidence to sail the daily seas of life without some sort of conservative plan for survival… the ups, the downs, the squalls, the doldrums. And, believe it or not, there are a whole bunch of us out here who live, and have lived, exactly that way!
Sure, we had self confidence, or often in my case, dumb luck. I can’t speak highly enough about dumb luck, as it has been with me all my life. Early on I even began subconsciously counting on it to see me through certain challenges that I had taken on, while knowing I wasn’t really qualified to successfully navigate them. Yes, dumb luck. Probably that’s what I should call my muse.
There has got to be a word or phrase that accurately describes one who blindly believes he can do a thing he’s never done before. A fool? Perhaps. Lucky as shit? Definitely! I’ve known a few guys who were better at convincing others they could do a thing, then somehow pulled it off in the process.
There was this one guy… but wait. I’ve slipped totally off the subject of dreams, and where we each set the bar for them. Oh well. Anyway, there was this one guy who didn’t dream of anything specific, except maybe of doing well with a thing, and becoming wealthy in the process. Actually, I’ve known several guys like that.
But this one guy was one hell of a bright dude… saw opportunities, occasionally invented those opportunities, always with the idea of turning them into money. And he was incredibly good at it. He was one of those I spoke of who was rarely qualified to take on a position, yet he did it enough times, in enough strangely different environments, that I simply watched in disbelief.
First, he quit university after two years, joined the Air Force and served his 4 years with the Air Force band, traveling around Europe and having to fly too often in old Air Force prop planes that (he said) were poorly maintained and always in danger of crashing somewhere.
Yeah, but that’s just the beginning. After the Air Force, he married, had two kids and became a music teacher in a small school in upstate New York. And without a music degree of any kind. The school and the parents loved him, and were sorry to see him go, when he left several years later. He was a Western guy, had grown up there, and the Eastern life didn’t suit him.
He moved his family to Colorado, went back to college and became an archaeologist for the BLM in western Colorado. He held that job, and did it well, for probably 5-6 years, maybe more. At the same time he bought a small music instrument store and turned it into a real money-maker. Finally the BLM forced him to leave the district position because of a “conflict of interests.”
Okay, so he dove into his music store business, learned to repair broken instruments on his own, and eventually bought and ran four more music stores. He divorced his first wife, lost his second to cancer, and eventually remarried. Not a dreamer at all, simply a most versatile guy who was bright enough to see opportunity and grab it, regardless of its inherent challenges that he would take on for the first time.
His advice to me, one very late night while sitting up in a tree on campus, polishing off a bottle of cheap wine, was this – “Hulse, there are three words that you can live by. They are honesty, integrity and intensity.”
Dull bulb that I was, I wrote those three words down on a small piece of paper the next morning, and carried them in my wallet for the next 40 years or so.
And what, I hear you asking, does all that have to do with dreamers, and dreaming? Well shit… pretty much nothing, I guess. I was going to tell you about the things I dreamed of as a young man, and I accidentally stumbled into this story about a, a… an anti-dreamer! But this was way better, don’t you think? And it is a pretty good story, isn’t it?
We are no longer friends, haven’t been for a while. We had a lot of fun together in those early years, but he was much smarter than I. He still checked in occasionally, but I suspect that he lost interest in me… I pretty much stayed in some form of the music business all my life, and didn’t make nearly the amount of money he has made. Hell, he had a condo in Panama City, Panama for a while. But I did fine, provided for a family of my own, and saw nearly all my dreams come true.
Strangely enough, he has sold his music stores and is now content to be with his family and do some traveling through Europe. Wait, that’s what I did, too… looks like we ended up pretty much the same, though by totally different paths. As you might guess, I think I like mine better.
Funny how far one can go on a bottle of cheap wine, up in a tree in Montana somewhere, and three little words,
Honesty. Integrity. Intensity.
Steve Hulse
