I love my Saturdays.

It’s not that I love to “sleep in”.  I do as a concept, it’s just never worked as a process.  I get up between five and six in the morning no matter when I go to sleep, the day of the week, or even the city I happen to be in.  The last one gets ugly, especially ’cause my body clock is perpetually tuned to eastern standard time.

It’s not because Saturday mornings give me time to spend with my family.  Yea, that’s if I lived in a Norman Rockwell painting, but trust me, Norm didn’t use my family as his model.

I used to love Saturday mornings because I whipped up my “weekend breakfast” consisting of omelets, bacon and/or sausage, hash browns, bagels, coffee, orange juice, and milk.  Now you know why I said “used to love”… the doctor wasn’t quite as excited about my cholesterol, calorie, and carbohydrate laden meal, although I thought the alliteration of the Three C’s was really witty.

For nearly a year and a half, I have spent every Saturday morning at Panera’s in a mini-Mastermind session with my friend, colleague, fellow speaker and fellow author Kent Burns.  Kent and I have known each other for years, but these Saturdays have been somethin’ else.  We talk business, we talk dreams (I’m his Dream Manager), we talk work, we talk family, we talk politics, religion, and sports.  Not necessarily in that order, but all discussions take place over an everything bagel and copious amounts of coffee.

I like Kent because he challenges me, my thinking, my assumptions, and my tolerance for his right-wing political views.  Kent has been on my “dream journey” with me, he was my first guinea-pig dream achiever and I’ve been doing whatever I can to help him reach his dreams related to his books and speaking career.  Kent even gave us the gift of his expertise at our first Recapture Your Dreams event where he was a featured speaker.

One of the other reasons I like Kent is that he says some really profound stuff.  As he did on Saturday.

We were talking about vocations and avocations and the difference between the two.  Kent knows how important this “dreamwork” is to me, how my mentorship under Matthew Kelly has changed my life in very profound ways.

“Marc, you need to do what you love to do so you can do what you need to do“.

That’s deep.  And more importantly, it’s true.

I love what I do for a living, the feeling is that strong.  I am honored to work with the clients that I do, most of them will never know how strongly I feel about them personally, and professionally, how invested I am in their development and the development of their employees.  My time on stage, conducting workshops and giving speeches, gets me to my “happy place” quicker than almost anything I can think of.  My work as Subject Matter Expert for APQC’s newest national benchmark on rewarding and retaining employees has filled a deep need I have for continuous learning.  And of course my writing (books, articles, and blogs) allows me to pontificate my thoughts and beliefs.

These are all things I love to do, and I am blessed that I get paid to do them.

But my dream-work is something I need to do.   I’ve only begun to understand the depth of this need.  It’s both selfish and selfless at the same time.  It’s a passion that has been building in me for a long time, perhaps the loss of my father was the trigger.

How many of you are living a life of passion?How many of you work for companies that give employees the opportunity, the education, and the freedom to do not only what they love to do, but also what they need to do?  And how powerful would it be to help them live their dreams?

Passion is defined as the state of being acted upon or affected by something external, especially something alien to one’s nature or one’s customary behavior.

As my friend Kent would say…  WOW.

Are You Living Your Dreams?

What Are You Waiting For?

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