035: Pursuing Your Dream in Seasons

In the Boat With Ben

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We know life comes in seasons, so it’s not surprising when the dream we’re chasing suddenly seems like it either doesn’t fit with the season we’re in, or looks different from what we expected. Still, it can cause us to feel discouraged enough to give up or desperate enough to fight against this natural flow in our lives.

In this more conversational episode, we get into our personal stories and experiences of how passing seasons have shifted and changed the pursuit of our dreams. We talk about how to protect your dream by letting your journey toward your dream match the season you’re in. We talk about how connecting to the deeper “why” can bring you fulfillment and purpose while the embers of your dream are glowing.

Highlights, Takeaways, & Quick Wins

• If there’s something you’re very passionate about that you have to leave behind, you’re just in a season and seasons change.
• Wake up 15 minutes earlier, before your kids get up, and do something that you love to do.
• No season is wasted.
• You can’t know what being engaged in the season you’re in now will equal for your passion when you’re able to pursue it in another season.
• Look for ways to make the most of the season that you’re in, whether you’re pursuing your passion actively or not.
• If you want your passion to be sustainable and long term, don’t pursue it without something to support you.
• 15 minute bursts of work added up over time will get you closer to where you’d like to be.

Show Notes

• 02:26 Ben: I want to come at this from two different angles. From the first perspective, I think about those times when you’re actively pursuing your passion, but because of your circumstances, you’re not able to pursue it exactly the way that you would ideally like to be doing it. It’s frustrating, and sometimes you end up getting ahead of yourself and getting too involved, which isn’t sustainable. Sometimes, you might be holding back a lot, when you could really be spending more time on it.
• 03:04 The other perspective I want to hit on is when you’re in a season where you actively can’t pursue your passion. Now is just not the right time. A lot of people in that situation feel like, “I guess my time pursuing this passion is done. I’m not going to get another opportunity for this.” It can feel like that’s the end. I want to talk about why that’s not necessarily the case, as well as some things we can do to shift our mindset and feel a little bit more fulfillment and excitement about a season where we’re not able to pursue our passion.

Ben’s Story

• 04:06 In the years before we were married and in the years since, we’ve gone through different seasons. We’ve had some trade-offs, so I think our story lends itself well to this topic. Each of us are going to tell the story of our passions and the seasons in which we were pursuing those passions. For me, music has always been a really important thing. First and foremost, I’m an artist, because I like many different forms of artistic expression for expressing my creativity. Music has been the primary focus of that. Before I was 13 or 14, I played the piano a little bit, but then I picked up the guitar and I started actually writing music.
• 05:20 I didn’t have a difficult time articulating the things that I was feeling and experiencing, but there was something deeper there that I wanted to communicate. Music was my way of doing that. Early on, I got a lot of affirmation as I started writing songs and sharing them with people. A lot of people said, “This is really great. This seems like it’s something you should be doing.” Around that same time, I was getting involved in my youth group and worship team, and I started playing and leading every once in a while.
• 05:58 The main worship leader there was training me. Again, a lot of people in that camp were saying, “Hey, you really have a gift for this. This is something you should be doing.” Music felt like more to me than a fun thing that I could do—it felt like a calling, like it was what I was made to do. I treated it that way. In my young adult life, I wasn’t very responsible with finances. I also didn’t know very much about building an audience and I didn’t understand all of the work that goes into making something like that successful. I was pretty idealistic. My idealism lasted into later adulthood.

I didn’t treat music with the kind of seriousness needed to make it a passion that was sustainable for me.

• 06:8 I’ll talk more about that later. As a young adult, going to college, having a job, and trying to pursue music, I was juggling all of that stuff and haphazardly trying to do more and more with music. I loved everything about it. When Rachel and I met, she didn’t like me at first. Once I grew on her and we decided to spend the rest of our lives together, she was also a musician, and it just made sense that we should do music together.
• 07:52 We started doing music together, and it was this really prominent thing for us. We formed a band and went through a couple of different iterations of our band, until we got to what I would consider was the best form of it. We had our drummer, Barrett, and Sean. Looking back, if I were thinking nostalgically, I would call that the Golden Age of the band. Things were really fun. We were playing and getting busier each year. Around that same time, just as we were starting to get our feet under us as a band, we also started our family. We started having kids.
• 08:52 My idealism kicked in again, and I was thinking, “We can do this. We can do a band and have kids. We’ll bring the kids along with us on tour, and it will be fine.” There are so many other variables in play. As the years went on, our family grew. We’re up to six now. As our family grew, the band got slower. We weren’t playing as much, until eventually there were times when we had nothing on our calendar.
• 09:38 Rachel: I don’t think it was necessarily an intentional thing. It wasn’t that people weren’t calling us.

After we started having children, we were so busy that it was really hard to keep up with our band.

• 09:51 Ben: What happens is that when you say no, you can’t do things, it stops working. We were saying that we needed to be able to bring our kids along with us. Again, I look back at the idealism, because in my idealism, I wasn’t being realistic about what people would be willing to do to have us out as a band. I wasn’t thinking about those things, so I had expectations that ultimately let me down. I didn’t have a realistic idea of how that would play out. When you say no or you can’t meet their terms, eventually, they stop calling, scheduling you, or having you out. We got slower and slower.
• 10:54 I found myself in this position where I was saying, “We need to rally again! We need to try and make this happen!” There were a couple of bouts of that, and each time, things got really tense. Things got shaky with either my business or my job—I was usually working in a church. It was bad news, and it ended up not going well. It was really difficult for me, but I had to be honest with myself and say, “I am a father of six young kids. I have a responsibility to take care of them. I love music, and I’m never going to stop writing songs or performing them wherever I can, but I can’t depend on that right now. That can’t be my focus, because it’s not going to support my family.”
• 12:14 This was where there was a little bit of a trade-off for us. Another thing that was going on that was making things kind of tense was when I stepped down from a regular job and income, and Rachel was still working full time. Rachel told me, “You can try and make money doing web and graphic design stuff. The band will make some money, and eventually, I’ll be able to step out of this.” We didn’t set any deadlines, and that went on indefinitely. In the meanwhile, Rachel had this passion, this thing she really wanted to do that she felt was her calling in life, that she wasn’t able to pursue because she was waiting for this other thing to happen that, in our circumstances, couldn’t happen.

Rachel’s Story

• 13:18 Rachel: I’ve always had an affinity for music. I love music. I believe that I was made to do music as well, but the thing I feel most passionate about is being a writer. I went to school and I got a journalism degree, and that was my full time job. I produced a newspaper every month. I wrote all of the stories, edited everything, and laid it all out. It was me—I was kind of the lone show. I was pretty miserable in that job for nine years. When Ben quit his job to pursue music, I think he and all of the guys quit their jobs. I was the only one left with a full time job, and we were traveling three weekends out of four in a month.
• 14:10 We were taking long tour trips and all kinds of stuff, and I was still trying to work full time and still trying to be a mother. It was so much pressure. I felt like I was going to explode. There was so much pressure to get things done and to do well at everything. I’m a perfectionist type—I have to do everything well, but I also wasn’t finding fulfillment in what I was doing, besides the music. The music, for me, was a little bit disappointing, because it felt like that dream had betrayed me.

It wasn’t as easy to do my passions on the side because I had so many other full time things that I was doing.

• 15:03 I was juggling the mother part and the job that I hated, and it was a tough season for me. When we had our twins, I was so overwhelmed. Two babies at a time is a really tough thing, and they were in the NICU for 20 days. For me, writing is a healing thing. I knew that I needed to do that, because I could not make it out of that season without writing. I came to Ben and said, “I don’t know what this is going to look like, but I really, really need to find some time to write.” We started setting aside 15 minutes a day where no kids were allowed to bother me and I could sit in my bed or my chair and write for 15 minutes.
• 16:02 It had to be a season where that was good enough. It was a small peak into my dream. I carried on that way for a while. I ended up losing my job, which was probably the best thing that could have happened, even though it was super scary and I still stress every now and then.
• 16:27 Ben: We had been saving money for a car for a while. My business had not caught up with our budget needs at that point, when Rachel was let go.
• 16:54 Rachel: Then, for the first time in our marriage and probably my life, I was able to pursue that writing dream. I feel so much different now, like a much healthier person. I feel like a much happier person, more joyful.
• 17:30 Ben: As difficult as it was for me to step away from the passion and the pursuit of music for now—we’ll talk more about that season, that mindset, and stepping away from something—it has really helped to see how much healthier our family is and how much healthier and more fulfilled Rachel is. I know that Rachel gets frustrated sometimes when she talks about putting her writing out there and feeling, sometimes, like she’s invisible. It’s a long game. The way she’s putting herself out there takes a while to get traction, especially since what she’s writing isn’t a need-to-have. It’s a nice-to-have.
• 18:36 If Rachel ever worries, “I’m not making any money from this or getting the kind of results I want,” the more valuable piece of her being able to pursue her passion is the fulfillment she has and the way it’s able to make her a healthier person, and how that translates into our family life. That’s worth far more than however much she could make in that same amount of time doing some other job.

When You Can’t Pursue Your Passion

• 19:20 Sometimes, you may even feel like, “Maybe I could, but I’m not willing to settle for a lesser version of it,” or, “Maybe I could right now, but something in my gut is telling me that now is not the right time.” I honestly feel like, at any given time, I have a mix of all three going on with music. What I would love to be doing would be playing regularly, doing shows two or three nights a week. With a family, with kids in school, it’s definitely not something that would be sustainable at this point in our lives. Everything takes so much energy.
• 20:14 There is a lot of difficulty there. I’m not willing to settle for just doing something online or releasing music instead of doing shows. If I’m going to do it, I really want to do it right. There’s that aspect of it. There’s also this feeling that now just isn’t the right time. I’ve gotten to a place with my business where I can make enough money and I’ve got enough time leftover that I’m able to invest in other things. This show is one of those things. I’m investing my time in this show. Eventually, we’re going to put out courses and materials to help folks work through some of their own struggles, and in this time we’re putting in upfront talking about these things, we want to help people and provide value.
• 21:21 This is an investment. I could be using this time to do music. I spend about six hours a week doing the seanwes podcast, and I could be using that time for music. There isn’t necessarily a shortage of time for me to pursue that dream, but I wouldn’t be able to pursue it the way that I would like to.
• 21:48 Rachel: I think that this is where Ben and I differ. I hear excuses from other parents who wanted to get a career started in writing—people write me all the time and say, “I don’t understand how you get so many words done in a week.” I didn’t start there. I started with 15 minutes a day. That’s it.

You can get up 15 minutes earlier, before your kids get up, and do something that you love to do.

• 22:21 Ben: I will get to that. I totally agree with you. If I was actively working toward pursuing my passion of music, I would make time to do things that didn’t look like the final version of it. This goes back to the gut feeling. I’m in a season right now where, in my gut, I know that it’s not the time to actively pursue that. There are other things I need to be building and focusing on right now.

When You Can’t Pursue Your Passion the Way You Want To

• 23:17 One of the things that keeps me sane and helps me in this season where I’m not able to actively pursue music is that I still stay plugged into music. It’s not very public-facing, not nearly as much as the other things I’m doing. I’m not trying to build an audience. I’m not trying to grow a brand. I’m not trying to do any of those things, but I’m doing the basic things to keep those embers glowing. I’m still writing songs. I still sit down and record things every once in a while. I get ideas, and I put on my voice memo recorder, and I play and capture those.
• 24:08 I could share those publicly, and I could put that stuff out there. Again, I don’t feel like this is the season to do that. Also, I don’t want to try and build something right now that I’m not able to build, that I can’t see through to it’s ideal version. If you’re in that situation, my encouragement to you would be this:

If there’s something you’re very passionate about that you have to leave behind, you’re just in a season and seasons change.

• 24:54 One day, your season will change again, and it might bring back to you the possibility of pursuing the thing you’re most passionate about. Spend what time you can keeping those embers glowing. Don’t let it die out completely or cut it off and say, “I guess I’m done with that forever.” Don’t act like that part of your life is over, but don’t let the absence of you being able to pursue something keep you from doing the things now that are meaningful, that bring you joy and fulfillment. For me, this show, being able to talk about the things that we talk about, is huge.
• 25:49 At my core, and this is even greater than music, I want to share from my experiences things that will help other people and will make their lives better. Podcasting is a great way to do that. I get to use a microphone, so that’s kind of like music, right? I get to edit audio a little bit before I send it off to Aaron. I get to do some of those same things, but at the core of who I am, what I get to do right now fulfills what I’m really about even if music isn’t part of it right now.
• 26:38 Rachel: Whenever we go through these seasons where we aren’t pursuing our passions the way we would like to, the way that is ideal to us—for example, when I was stuck in a job for nine years that I really didn’t like—the experiences, emotions, and struggle that came from trying to be a good parent, employee, bass player, singer, and all of those things were fuel for what I do now in writing. I use a lot of those stories in what I tell now. I teach people how to pursue their passion in the small spaces.

No season is wasted and that can provide hope for us in the seasons that don’t look the way we would like them to look.

• 27:38 Ben: The things you’re going through right now, the season that you’re in, is filled with richness, with experiences, skills you can develop, and people you can meet. You can’t know what being engaged in the season you’re in now will equal for your passion when you’re able to pursue it in another season. You can’t know that, so why not make the most of that?
• 28:09 Rachel: Unless you’re completely closed off to any kind of learning or “gathering” opportunities, because our subconscious is constantly gathering things to be used in our art, we can use every season to make our art richer. I also feel very strongly about that.

Limiting Your Passion

• 28:53 Ben: It may feel like it’s really hard or like things are falling apart in other areas of your life because you’re trying so hard to make your passion look the way you think it should. You’re trying to make it look like the ideal version of pursuing your passion. What Rachel shared in her experience really lends itself to this. There was a time when she was working a full time job, being a mother, still being involved in the band, but she really wanted to write. Even though we had to carve out those 15 minutes, surely she could have done more than that. I’m curious to know why you limited yourself, Rachel, and how you made yourself okay with that?
• 29:50 Rachel: I think I limited it because I felt bad. I was working a job all day where I didn’t get to see the kids, and then I would come home and we would spend the typical time at dinner, have baths and the typical nighttime routine, and then at the worst part of the day, when they’re getting out of bed 10,000 times, I was closing myself in a room and writing. I didn’t want to leave Ben on his own for longer than 15 minutes, because for me, I would find that really exhausting if I was the parent left with the wildlings when they didn’t want to go to bed. That was part of it. I was also extremely determined to get as much done as possible in that amount of time.
• 30:44 Ben: The constraint, in that sense, was good. I definitely wouldn’t want for her to feel like the constraint depended on whether or not I was okay, because I don’t want her to feel guilty, like she’s doing things at the expense of my sanity because I’m juggling all of these kids while she’s sitting there writing. On the other side of it, it wouldn’t have been appropriate during that time for Rachel to try and spend three hours a day writing, because of the circumstances we were in. What Rachel is experiencing today with her writing looks a lot more like her ideal. You’re spending, what, about five or six hours a day, Rachel?
• 31:34 Rachel: I spend about three hours writing, and the rest is business and that stuff.
• 31:41 Ben: She’s spending three hours a day writing, plus she’s also spending some time working on social media stuff, promoting her writing, submitting articles, and all of that stuff. In order for Rachel to get to where she is right now, she had to go through a season where she wasn’t doing that version of it. Even when Rachel first lost her job, she didn’t just dive right in. There was this buffer zone where she was testing the water and we were trying to figure out how it would work with our schedule. There was a little bit of a gradual fading into what it looks like today. When a lot of people set out to pursue their passion, there’s a catalyst moment when they lose or quit a job or something shifts in their circumstances. The world tells them that they’re doing their passion a disservice if they don’t dive in and go for it completely.

We protect our passion and make it more sustainable when we’re mindful of what we’re able to do in the season that we’re in.

• 33:12 Rachel: Having those constraints, this last year has been spent on mastering my productivity. I hear from writers who have trouble writing a couple hundred thousand words in a year, and I’ve reached a couple hundred thousand in a month. I was honed on that 15 minutes a day. You have to use your time wisely when you only have a certain amount of time to pursue that passion. That’s the gift that constraints have given me. I have a focus that I did not have in a full time job, when I was working eight hours a day for someone else.
• 34:03 Ben: What Rachel is describing is all the more reason to embrace the season that you’re in. It’s not just that you should tolerate your circumstances even though you want to do more, having this begrudging attitude.
• 34:19 Rachel: I won’t say that I don’t ever have that. There are times when I long for more time. I try to approach it with more of a positive mindset, which isn’t my forte. Ben’s the one who puts me in my place a lot of the time.
• 34:55 Ben: You have to be realistic about the circumstances that you’re in right now, the amount of value you’re able to produce, and how much your time is actually worth. How much are you actually able to invest?

If you want your passion to be sustainable and long term, you’re going to have a difficult time if you pursue it without something to support you.

• 35:36 In Rachel’s case, the reason she’s able to spend the time that she spends on writing is because we don’t depend on that time for our finances. If that weren’t the case, we couldn’t sustain that indefinitely, and her long term ability to pursue that passion would suffer. Look at the reality of your situation. Once you can come to terms with that and name it, call it what it is, you can say, “This is the season that I’m in. In this season, this is what I’m able to do to take steps toward what will ultimately be the ideal version of pursuing my passion.”
• 36:36 Once you’ve determined what you can do today, the question you want to ask yourself is, “How can I make the most of this season for what it is?” With Rachel’s constraint of only writing for 15 minutes, that was the question that she asked. The answer to that, the thing she was able to learn from that season, has served her so well in the season she’s in now.

Make the Most of Little Time

• 37:06 Rachel: It really does take practice to not only be okay with the season that you’re in, but to be able to create in short time bursts. Even if we’re working full time jobs or we have a big family, there’s always some kind of time where you can pursue your passion. It’s definitely going to take focus and consistency, dedication to pursuing that in those margins, and that’s not an easy thing to do.
• 37:45 Ben: In the guide that we’re offering, How to Get a Weekly, Guilt-Free Work Block, we talk about how a work block can be different for different people. Rachel is up to more than an hour and a half where she can focus and be productive that whole time. Some people haven’t developed the skill yet to be able to focus for that long. If they had 15 minutes of uninterrupted time, that would be really meaningful. In a recent episode of the seanwes podcast, we were talking about surprising lessons on business from nature (Related: e247 Unexpected Business Lessons From Nature). One analogy that started that conversation was someone writing in about a tree stump.
• 38:43 They were looking at the tree stump and at the individual rings, and at the individual rings weren’t so impressive by themselves. When you back out and look at the stump to see the pattern, first of all, that’s beautiful, but also, that was a tree! If 15 minutes of time is the season that you’re in, that’s okay.

15 minute bursts of work may seem insignificant, but many of those added up over time will get you closer to where you’d like to be.

• 39:38 Rachel: I want to speak to the parents, because parenting is exhausting. Our kids have the ability to drain us of every ounce of creative energy and every good thought that’s in our minds. Even if we’re giving our passion 10 or 15 minutes a day, we’re setting ourselves up for even greater success as parents. We owe it to ourselves to give ourselves that time. I look back at those journals where I wrote for 15 minutes a day, and there are so many memories in those.
• 40:31 Some of it was poetry. Some of it was a short journal entry about what we did as a family. There’s so much value in that, not only for me, but I’ve released some of those journals out into the world. It’s valuable for other people to see a parent struggling through this season of not having enough time and feeling not enough. It’s such a valuable thing.

Difficult Seasons Are Vital to Success

• 41:04 Ben: You hear the story over and over. You see an interview from someone well established in their field—maybe they’re a successful filmmaker, director, author, painter, or whatever it is—and when asked about those early years, when things were difficult and there were a lot of constraints, they didn’t start out being successful in their field. You don’t go into filmmaking with all these people to direct, a huge budget, all of the nicest cameras, and access to the best actors. You don’t start that way. In those interviews, they always point back to that time when things were really difficult, when you’re in a season that you’d rather not be in.
• 42:05 They talk about how valuable that was to their current success, how vital it was. They look back with fondness and say, “Those were the good times. Yeah, it’s cool that I get to make blockbusters now, but those times when we were on a shoestring budget and we weren’t sure if we were going to be able to buy groceries that week, that was the good stuff.” We might look back on our situation that way, too. Right now, Rachel’s writing and I have my business. We’re doing okay, but things are a little bit tight. This is an uncertain time. What’s going to happen? It’s exciting and fun, and because we’re going through this together as a family, it has a way of bringing us closer and giving us a camaraderie that we wouldn’t have if we weren’t going through that struggle.
• 43:44 Pursuing your passion in seasons can really be a tough thing to do, especially if you’re in a season where now is just not the right time. If you’re in that season, I encourage you to look for ways to make the most of the season that you’re in, whether you’re pursuing your passion actively or not. The attitude and the mindset that you approach your passion with right now will set you up for future success.