There are plenty of learning curves to choose from. Traditionally, many of us have used pain and suffering and sacrifice and failure as our chief learning curves. If this is true for you, you have probably attended the school of hard knocks, and you have employed grief and heartache as your teachers.

It is well to remember, however, that you can also choose from a range of more pleasant learning curves, such as love as a learning curve, authenticity as a learning curve, and success as a learning curve.

You choose your learning curve. No one or nothing else makes this choice for you.

Step 3 – Give Every Experience its Rightful Place

Scientific experiments have shown that the mind does not know the difference between that which is experienced and that which is imagined. This suggests that every time you re-live a negative experience in your mind, adding some extra sauce as you go along, your mind believes you are experiencing it again. So instead of living an experience just the one time, you live it a hundred, a thousand or even countless times.

For the last few years, wherever I go, people want to discover how to become a career renegade. They all want to know how to turn something, whether it’s knitting, painting, writing, or growing grapes, into enough cash to call it a living. Especially when everyone around them keeps telling them it’s just not possible.

The conversation inevitably turns to the two giant questions that stop nearly everyone in their tracks:

1. What if the thing that makes my heart sing doesn’t pay enough to support me?
2. Or, what if it could be lucrative, but only if I was at the top of the field?

I was waiting at a small airport many years ago, when I struck up a conversation with one of the airport workers, a young man of about twenty. During our talk he found out I had a private pilot’s license, and he said that he would love to get his pilot’s license. I asked him why he was waiting.

“It’s too expensive,” he said. “As soon as I found out how much the lessons cost, I gave up the idea.”
“There’s opportunity all around you,” I responded energetically. “You work at an airport! Talk to the owners of the planes, talk to the pilots, talk to the crew members, find out if there’s something you can do in exchange for lessons. When you decide you can’t do it, it’s over. You can just as easily decide to do it and, in time, you’ll have your pilot’s license!”