You know — my Mom’s a bad influence. I have coffee with her every morning and she always gives me these ideas. She makes me do things. One thing that I love about my Mom,  something that makes her such a valuable person to have in my court is that she always gives you objective advice. Even if something is really personal, she always steps outside of the situation and does her very best not to influence your decision. Now that might sound like NOT giving advice at all, but it’s really forcing you to think through the problem from both sides and make a decision knowing all the pros and cons.  And she doesn’t take my crap either. When I told her I wanted to go train tigers she sent me an email with airfare deals and my frequent flier number. This either A.) Makes me super excited and reinforces my desire to just do it, or B.) If it’s too ridiculous it makes me balk and say, “Whoah! I didn’t think you’d actually go for that. Lets just think about this for a minute.” But what I really love, is that she never laughs at my ridiculous ideas — and she always tells me to go for it when I actually act upon them!

Like this morning, when I told her,  “Mom, I think I want to be an actress!” So she stops what she’s doing and looks to me and says, “Well honey, I guess you just need to move to L.A. then. I’ll call Uncle Jimmy and see if you can stay with him for awhile. ”

My friend Jason told me that the main actor from the popular show Mad Men just decided he wanted to be an actor one day. He said he’s always been interested in acting, and gave himself 5 years, and picked a date in the future. He would go at it full force for 5 years, and if he didn’t make it after 5 years he would move on to something else. I love this philosophy because too often we quit JUST before we succeed. Most people who have failed didn’t do so because they weren’t good enough or couldn’t do it, they failed because they gave up too early. Most of the time we have NO IDEA how close we are to success when we quit!

I was talking to my friend Carolyn yesterday, telling her about my thoughts of maybe going back to school for theater and weighing it against the decision to just move out west and give it a try. After saying it out loud I thought it sounded so stupid! I looked at her sheepishly saying, “Well I guess it does sound kind of ridiculous.” And then thought about it for a minute and said, “But you know what? I’ve done a lot of ridiculous things lately!” Carolyn laughed and told me, “That’s right! Rachel you always just go out and DO things where most people would be afraid to even entertain the idea.” Carolyn is so right! How can you know if an idea is too absurd until you pursue it? You could spend forever and a half planning and researching and gathering information but eventually you just need to go do it and learn along the way.

One of my favorite movie lines is from the 2010 production of Alice in Wonderland with Johnny Depp and Mia Wasikowska. When Alice’s father would listen to her dreams and ambitions, he would tell her “You know Alice, I sometimes think of 6 impossible things before breakfast.” When the 6 impossible things that Alice thinks of start becoming a reality, this advice ultimately helped Alice slay the evil Jabberwocky.

At the risk of sounding campy and cliche, we all have our own Jabberwocky don’t we? The first step in achieving your goals, or realizing your dreams is to believe that you can. One of my favorite quotes is from Henry Ford who said, “Whether you believe you can, or you believe you can’t, you’re right.” The second step is just to GO DO IT! Yes you should do your research, and yes you should weigh the pros and cons and make a rational decision, but just take action! And don’t let your planning to plan paralyze you.

It’s okay to go try something, and decide that you hate it. You don’t know what you want! There’s no way you can know what you want until you try some things out. You’ll never know until you try.