You see, you are in charge of your life. You are responsible for how your life looks today and what your future will look like.

Now, I’m not saying you can control every aspect of your life, but I think you know what I mean. We are all responsible for what we do and don’t do in our lives.

One of the best decisions I ever made was to find and go after my passion with relentless determination.

It’s very simple, but not easy.

If you’re ready to take one single step every day, you can reach your goals and live the life of your dreams.

1. Get Clear

The first step towards turning passion into profit is to get clear about what you want.

For me, this means setting goals that are specific, realistic, and that have a deadline.

What do you truly want from life? Do you want to contribute to humanity with your art? Or do you want to travel the world, experience new cultures, and share what you’ve learned with the rest of us? You can create whatever you decide.

There is always a way to turn your passion into profit if you’re determined enough to make it happen.

2. Take Action

Next, you need to be willing to take massive action. You need to be willing to take steps every single day towards achieving your goals.

If your goal is to travel the world, find out exactly how much money you need, what you need, and how you need to do it. If your goal is to travel to Thailand and live there for a year, find out how much airfare is, how much the cost of living is, and everything else that’s essential.

Then ask yourself what you have to do to make it happen. Start executing even if you don’t know exactly how it will all work out.

Something magical happens when you take action. Never underestimate the power of the universe.

3. Model People

One of the most powerful tips I can give you is to model people. What I mean by this is to find people that are doing exactly what you want to be doing, and do what they did.

If you do what successful people have done to become successful, you will become successful. It is inevitable.

This may mean emailing someone and becoming their friend. For some people it may mean joining a training course where you can get access to people that are already living the kind of life you want to live.

Whatever it is, avoid making excuses and take action. There will be no perfect time to go after your dreams, so you might as well start now.

4. Destroy Your Obstacles

Once you have a very clear goal of what you want to achieve, take a clean sheet of paper and write down the obstacles you think you will face on the path toward your goal.

What this does is it anticipates the bad stuff that will happen, and it lets you come up with solutions before you even bump into the obstacles.

This usually eliminates most of the obstacles right away, and makes the whole journey smoother.

5. Face Your Fears

Going after your passion is not a walk in the park. If it was, more people would live a life of passion and fulfillment.

Facing your fears is a simple as being determined to get to your goals with fears or no fears.

You can either succumb to your fears and live a life of mediocrity, or you can face your fears and live a life of true freedom. The choice is yours.

6. Baby Steps

Most people underestimate how much progress they can make in a few years just by taking one small step every single day towards their goals.

When you have your plan, and you have your obstacles in front of you, it’s time to brainstorm ideas of what steps you can take today to get closer to making a living doing what you love. Nothing remarkable needs to happen; you just have to start the journey toward your dreams.

7. Patience

This journey takes a lot of patience.

You will run into a lot of obstacles, you will have to face your fears, as things probably won’t go as smoothly as you’d like them to go. It’s all a part of the journey. And none of it really matters when you love what you do.

Turning your passion into profit is something that everyone can do, but not everyone has the determination or willpower to make it happen.

It is up to you to decide whether you want to live up to your full potential or not.

Henri Junttila writes at Wake Up Cloud, where you can get his free course: Find Your Passion in 5 Days or Less. And if you liked this article, you will enjoy one of Henri’s top articles, 33 Powerful Ways of Overcoming Fear.

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: 7 Simple Steps to Turn Your Passion Into Profit

Anyone motivated to be successful—to really make an impact with your life—has a list of things they want to do. Things to have, things to be. Places they want to go, people they’d love to meet.

You may not have a list of life goals all written down on paper. You probably keep an immediate to-do list, you might have some of your long-term life goals written down on scraps of paper or word doc lists on your computer here and there, but you know at the very least you have those things somewhere in the back of your mind.

I’ve challenged myself with yearly goals at the New Year in the last couple years, and I’ve mapped out plans for my businesses and different projects. I don’t frequently achieve everything on my lists, but as my friend Ramit says, if you’re not failing at a couple things each month, you’re not trying hard enough. And I’ve found that sharing those goals publicly gives me additional motivation and accountability to follow through, and sometimes friends and readers can offer words of advice, help, or partnership on some goals.

I’ve had some pieces of the puzzle in the works for a long time, but I hadn’t put together a comprehensive “bucket list” of things I want to do before I die until recently. It wasn’t until Sean Ogle recently wrote about bucket lists, and how to identify the most important life goals that will enable you to achieve the other items on your list—the travel goals, the possessions, the fun stuff—that I finally got motivated to really solidify my whole life list and put it out here to share with the world.

Several friends and bloggers have compiled great bucket lists that have helped inspire some of the things I decided to put on my list. There’s a mix of places I’d love to jet set, landmarks I’d like to see, adventures I’d like to have, experiences I hope to share with specific friends and family, and of course I immediately took Sean’s advice and prioritized the importance of the enabling goals that will make everything else possible.

So without further ado, here’s my bucket list—or, 84 adventures you can follow me on here at Thrilling Heroics:

Enabling Goals

1. Develop an online business that earns over $3000/month in passive income.
2. Build a blog with 10,000+ subscribers.
3. Write an ebook or launch a digital product that earns $6000+.
4. (Self-)publish a book.
5. Achieve 100% debt freedom.
6. Get an article published in the print edition of Esquire, GQ, Wired, Details, or Maxim magazine.
7. Leverage my blog audience to make a major positive impact in at least 10 peoples lives (we’ve already helped Ryan, and currently in the process of helping Tim & two other scholarship awardees at DNA).
8. Speak at South by Southwest Interactive and stick around for the music festival in Austin, Texas.
9. Set up a corporation in Hong Kong.
10. Make at least $120K in a given year.
11. Get a second passport, and maybe a third too.
12. Complete my Personal MBA.
13. Attend an official TED Conference. (Already had the honor of helping plan the locally-organized TEDxBKK!)
14. Sell my photography and other creative artwork.
15. Organize a lifestyle designer/blogger summit in Asia.

Adventures to Have & Things to Do

1. Learn to rock climb in Railay Beach, Krabi.
2. Climb up to the mountaintop Wat Tum Sua Temple in Krabi, Thailand.
3. Learn to sail.
4. Climb a volcano.
5. Eat slow-roasted crispy suckling pig in Bali (delicious babi guling).
6. Spend a week with friends at Burning Man in the Nevada desert.
7. Go skydiving. Go skydiving again.
8. Learn to play guitar.
9. Achieve fluency in French.
10. Achieve fluency in Spanish.
11. Get ripped with The Hollywood Physique.
12. Replace my morning coffee with Yerba Maté for at least a week.
13. Get a tattoo in memory of my late friend Chris Cravens, with a design by my best friend Patrick.
14. Take my dad to eat real Kobe beef at Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant CUT in Los Angeles.
15. Spend a whole lot more time with my grandfather and learn about his life before he leaves us.
16. Raise another dog. (Sadly, my family’s 14-year-old golden retriever passed away while I was abroad earlier this year.)
17. Take my best friend Patrick to a Daft Punk concert.
18. Share a beer with Carlos Miceli in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
19. Settle abroad for at least 3 months somewhere in South America, Mexico, Barcelona, France, and more.
20. Live at least 3 months in San Francisco, San Diego, and Austin, Texas.
21. Work for a month at a winery—like, in the fields, growing grapes—in California or France wine country.
22. Drive the Pacific Coast Highway in a convertible Lamborghini.
23. Camp under the stars on the beach and see the sun rise.
24. Participate in the world’s biggest water fight during Thailand’s New Year’s festivities (Songkran).
25. Do a beach photoshoot with a swimsuit model.
26. Go to a shooting range and fire off a Kalashnikov rifle and a Desert Eagle .50 Action Express. More importantly, learn to disassemble & reassemble them.
27. Drive a Tesla Roadster.
28. Take a gondola along the Venice canals in Italy.
29. Ride camel back across the Sahara desert.
30. Take a Serengeti safari in Tanzania and Kenya.
31. Trek through the jungle on the back of an elephant.
32. See the view from the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris (twice).
33. See the view from the top of Corcovado Mountain in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
34. Party on Ibiza for New Year’s Eve in Spain’s Ballearic Islands.
35. Go to the Glastonbury Festival in England and see Stonehenge.
36. Participate in the Brazilian Carnaval celebration.
37. See what Mardi Gras and Voodoo Fest are all about in New Orleans, Louisiana.
38. Learn a martial art.
39. Learn to surf (took lessons in Bali 2010). Learn to surf properly!
40. Learn to DJ or mix electronic music.
41. Own a Ducati motorcycle.
42. Buy and restore a 1965 or 1966 Shelby Mustang GT350.
43. Stay in an over-the-water bungalow in beautiful Bora Bora in the French Polynesian islands.
44. Spontaneously walk into the airport and randomly buy a same-day ticket to wherever looks appealing.
45. Drive the Amalfi coast near Sorrento, Italy.
46. Rent a villa on Lake Como or Lake Lugano with friends.
47. Own a small bar or restaurant with live music.
48. Leave any wealth or assets I have when I go out to people who really deserve and need them.

Places to Travel & Landmarks to See

1. The ancient temples at Angkor Wat, Cambodia
2. The Acropolis and Parthenon in Athens, Greece
   
3. The Sistine Chapel and Vatican City in Rome, Italy
4. The pyramids at Giza, Egypt
5. Machu Picchu in Peru
6. The home of the Oracle at Delphi, Greece
7. The Taj Mahal
8. The ancient city of Petra, carved into canyon walls in southern Jordan
9. The Karnak temple and the Valley of the Kings near Luxor, Egypt
10. The Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza near Cancun, Mexico
11. Iguazu Falls on the Argentina/Brazil border
12. The Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy
13. The Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
14. The Banaue Rice Terraces in the Philippines
15. The Borobudur stuppa in Java, Indonesia
16. Gorgeous Zion National Park, Utah
17. Niagara Falls lit up at night
18. Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet
19. Jerusalem’s Old City
20. The Hagia Sofia mosque in Istanbul, Turkey
21. The abbey of Mont-St-Michel in France

You’ll notice I’ve included a few things I’ve already accomplished. I’ve also taken Sean’s advice to have a few things that will be easier to achieve, and a few goals I can obtain in the very near future. I think when you make your own list it’s important to recognize the big things you’ve already done that you’d always dreamed of, and include a few “gimme” goals so you can start off strong and stay motivated.

Of course I expect that my feelings about some items on the list may change throughout the course of my life. I may not achieve everything, some of my goals will change, or I may add new items to the list. But, it’s a starting point and it’s something I can always refer back to to remind me what I want to accomplish.

Of course if there’s anything you can help me achieve, or something you want to join in on for example, leave a shout out and we’ll talk! OR if you dig what I do here at Thrilling Heroics, click here to make a donation to my Life List Fund, help me achieve some of my dangerously ambitious goals, and follow me on these adventures!

What’s on Your List?

Read Sean’s 10 Tips for Creating a Successful Bucket List, and his Bucket List Management tips, and also take a look at my lengthy breakdown of how to establish meaningful personal and professional goals for yourself in all the important realms of your life. It’s written to help you establish yearly goals, but the principles can be applied to building your own life goals list too.

If you have a bucket list already, share it. If not, take a look at the above articles and get on it! Your time here is short, so remember to value every day you have and make the most of it.

Featured image by divemasterking2000

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: My Bucket List: Awesome Goals for a Thrillingly Heroic Life

Benny Lewis is a permanent traveler who’s been globe trotting for over seven years, learning languages as he goes. To hear him tell it, he wasn’t particularly talented when it came to learning languages in an academic setting, but his love for them came about in 2003, after a trip to Spain, where he immersed himself in the local culture and discovered that learning languages isn’t so difficult when you approach it with the right mindset. He now speaks seven languages fluently (and several others partially), and holds himself accountable to learning new languages in just 3 months, earning himself the fitting nickname Benny the Irish Polyglot.

His passion for linguistics and cultures has led him to nearly twenty countries, and also led him to seek out online work that would enable his full-time travels. He calls himself a “technomad”—a technology-enabled, location-independent freelancer, combining his electronic engineering degree from University College Dublin with his deep linguistic knowledge translating technical documents and picking up different jobs anywhere he travels.

I had the pleasure to spend some time with Benny on his recent trip to Bangkok, and sat down with him to talk about his travels and his unconventional approach to learning languages. He stresses the importance of confidence in your speaking abilities, and insists that it’s not necessary to speak perfectly at the start, but it is necessary to start! He also has unique tips for making the time to learn a new language, and assures people that you don’t have to travel to learn or maintain languages.

If you’ve ever been interested to pick up even a little of the local language when you travel abroad, or to reach fluency in a second or third language, give our video a watch below:

• 1:20 – All about Benny’s 3-month language missions
  
• 2:00 – How a blogs can help you achieve your goals
• 2:56 – Language hacking versus academic language learning
• 5:15 – The importance of attitude; Is your language half full?
• 6:45 – Language-learning methods, image-association
• 8:10 – 3 top language-hacking tips
• 11:40 – How to keep a language fresh when you aren’t actively using it (Benny recommends using Couchsurfing.com, Meetup.com, LiveMocha.com)
• 13:40 – Travels & tech nomad experience
• 15:20 – Get specific with your language-learning objectives
• 16:25 – Confidence and re-framing your mindset about languages

Here’s a quick video of the Thai he learned (in a matter of days) while he was here, which also illustrates his emphasis on “filtering”:

Maybe you’ve struggled trying to learn a language before but were never successful…

Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to spend years before you were able to converse in a foreign language? If you were able to start speaking from day ONE? Doesn’t that sound like something you’d love to be able to do?

Imagine, not being scared by all the grammar and vocabulary you feel like you need to know before you’d be comfortable speaking…

For confidence boosters and language hacks to get you started communicating immediately, get your copy of Benny’s new Language Hacking Guide today, compiled after over 7 years of experience.

As you consider the benefits of deciding to learn Benny’s method, you might like to see some examples of the expert insight he can offer you. You can follow his travel-hacking videos (in seven different languages) at IrishPolyglot.com, and follow his 3-month language missions and language-hacking tips by subscribing to his blog FluentIn3Months.com. Some of his best tips and advice:

• How to take as much as you like in your hand luggage
• How to speak Portuguese as if you were from Rio
• How to practice a foreign language for free without traveling
• How to speak a language pretty well, starting from scratch, in just two months
• The smartest decision you will ever make to achieve fluency

If you want to learn a new language effectively, click here to get your own copy of Benny’s invaluable Language Hacking Guide now!

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Language Hacking with Benny the Irish Polyglot: The Fastest Way to Learn a New Language

Hey Jun, so give us a little professional background on how you got to be where you are and what your role is with Future Delivery.

As an undergraduate at UCLA, I got a taste for entrepreneurship by founding Bruin Consulting, the UCLA Undergraduate Case Competition, and the Veridical Group. Each experience taught me something new about myself and really amplified my abilities as a leader and consultant, and my business sense.

After I graduated from UCLA, I worked at an international consulting firm for about three months. At the three month mark, I realized that the corporate life was just not for me. I mean, the pay was good, the job was steady, it was around 55 hours a week (not bad for consulting), and we even had an amazing Flavia machine in the kitchen! What drove me to step aside from the corporate world was that I felt unchallenged, and that I was in cruise control. You go to work, come back home, eat dinner, you might have time for the gym, and then you sleep. It became an endless routine!! From my experiences as an entrepreneur, I knew that my passion was in having my own baby (company).

I stepped aside from my corporate job and teamed up with Yu-kai Chou, my Delta Sig pledge brother who co-founded Bruin Consulting and the Veridical Group with me. Together, we founded Future Delivery. This is a startup company; therefore, I wear at least twenty different hats. My main responsibility is that of Chief Marketing Officer. I am in charge of everything having to do with our branding, advertising, lead generation, conversion, and client fulfillment. I am the face of Future Delivery, so I must always make sure I look my best!

What is the new FDCareer roleplaying game all about? Give our readers a run-down of the community and why it’s such a great benefit.

Many of you play video games and watch TV all day. Many undergraduates go to class, play and party all night, and ignore their careers until right before they graduate—which in many cases, may be too late. We created the FD RPG so that undergraduates and young professionals can have fun while developing themselves professionally.

In the FD RPG, every time you gain an internship, get a high GPA, or become a leader of an organization, you gain experience points and level-up on the site. As you level-up, you gain prestige, new abilities, access to new areas of the site, and will be able to recruit with more prestigious firms. We’ve also implemented Quests that help you develop career-wise. For example, a Quest for a Consultant could be a business analysis case. You will have to solve a company’s problem—could be profitability or an acquisition—and you will submit your solutions online to be reviewed by our expert panel. A Marketing Quest could be to gain social influence on Twitter by gaining more followers.

Monster.com is about helping people apply for a job.

Vault.com is about helping people research companies.

FD Career is about getting students and young professionals prepared for their careers. It helps you discover what you want to be, and how to get there.

You’ve got a great blog where you share your journey with entrepreneurship. Can you share some of your thoughts on the startup life and your opinions on work-life balance?

Hahaha… there is no work life balance. To be a successful entrepreneur (not that I’m successful yet), your work and life have to be one thing. That is the key. My personal relationships, family relationships, and girlfriend relationships have suffered because of the path that I have chosen. But these are the sacrifices that you have to make in order to put yourself in the position to be successful.

For example, I probably have time to hang out with my friends from UCLA or high school once or twice a month. I do see my girlfriend a lot during the week, but this is how we spend time together: her sitting in front of the TV watching a show or movie, me sitting by her side with my laptop and earphones on so that I can concentrate and meet my project deadlines.

This life is NOT for everyone. Cody, I chat with you all the time at 3am because we’re both still up doing work. We don’t even complain about it because we know this is the life that we have chosen, so all we can do is laugh. Though the road is tough, you will love what you do.

I keep pushing because I truly believe in the idea, I love my baby, and I love my team. If we fail, I would gladly start another company will all of them.

I’ve heard some rumblings about a sort of reality show that you guys are putting together to showcase your experience starting up a company?

Glad you brought it up! Our first video will launch this week! Hopefully it’ll launch before this is posted so you can link to the first episode. [See Episode 1, Part 1 here, and Part 2 here, also see below. —Ed.]

The Living the Startup Life video series is for all of those people who have a great idea but don’t know where to start, for everyone stuck in their corporate job afraid to leave their company to pursue their dream career, and for everyone who just wants to watch some guys have a lot of fun while succeeding or failing.

Lastly, would you mind sharing a bit about your education and how your experience has helped you become an avid entrepreneur. I’m interested if you have any good tips for students or twentysomethings that want to start their own businesses and really exercise their entrepreneurial muscles!

Why yes I do. My major at UCLA did NOT prepare me for my entrepreneurial quest. The three main things that prepared me to pursue the entrepreneurial life were:

1. Finding a mentor who guided me on my path to become an entrepreneur
2. Getting a taste of it while starting an orginzation and a company as an undergrad
3. Reading business books in class instead of paying attention to the teacher

• The E-Myth Revisited and E-Myth Mastery by Michael Gerber
• Good to Great by Jim Collins
• Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi

If you do these three things, then you will be prepared to become an entrepreneur.

Thanks for your willingness to share your wisdom with the Thrilling Heroics community, Jun.

If you have any questions about entrepreneurship, Jun is genuinely interested in helping you guys out and making new friends on this great online web community of ours, so please feel welcome to contact him at Jun.Loayza (at) FDcareer (dot) com or on his blog Living the Startup Life. If you are interested in the FDcareer RPG, I highly recommend it! In my experience on the community site, I’ve already reached level 25 (currently #7 on the leaderboard!) so feel free to connect with me if you have questions about blogging, WordPress, or web development, and keep an eye out, because I will be creating some web design and blogging-related quests for you guys in the next few weeks! (Check out a little more about the FDCareer RPG in this intro video below.)

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Young Entrepreneur Jun Loayza Reveals the Interactive Web Game That Will Rock Your Career!

At last year’s Entrepreneurship Week, President Hennessey described how teaching entrepreneurship does five important things within our society:

1. It increases people’s creativity and willingness to think outside the box
2. It encourages individuals to follow their passion and excel at what they do
3. It creates a community which embraces and leads change
4. It encourages people to have a “glass half full” attitude and approach problems as potential opportunities, and…
5. It increases students’ willingness to take on and overcome new challenges by building excellent teams!

The entrepreneurial spirit is definitely prevalent throughout Silicon Valley, and perhaps universities like Stanford are to thank for it. It certainly is home to many people who refuse to let the fear of failure prevent them from pursuing their BIG dreams! Remember, as Wayne Gretzky says, “You’ll always miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: 5 Kickass Benefits of Entrepreneurial Learning

In a recent article, Paul asks the important question “can leadership be taught?” He gives a very good explanation of the current beliefs in the field. Leadership is thought to be up to two-thirds emotional intelligence, which is something we aren’t always taught in school. Paul gives a conclusive case why Sacramento State should consider adding leadership teaching to its curricula, and cites several successful institutions who have implemented similar programs (especially the LEADS program prevalent throughout the UC system).

Take a read and maybe you’ll learn a few things about leadership! Anyone Else Interested in Leadership Studies?

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Can Leadership Be Taught?