Hot-air ballooning and missed opportunities

Well, I’m one step closer to getting in the basket!

Last Sunday we all went down to Birr, Co Offaly to see the hot-air balloon festival in action. I have to say it was amazing. There were about ten balloons that took off one after the other, and it was a spectacle.

It has been on my bucket list for a while to get a hot-air balloon experience, and after seeing them last Sunday, it’s something to be done. Now that my family has seen it and is happy that it’s safe, it’s planned for when my eldest, Mark, finishes his junior cert exams!

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it is that there’s no point in hanging around waiting for the perfect moment to take action. Whether that be in business or personal life. We all have dreams and desires and want to achieve certain goals. Yet we keep putting them off on the long finger and waiting for the perfect moment to come around. There’s no such thing as the perfect moment.

We miss so much time and we let so many opportunities pass us by. Opportunities show up everywhere, our job is to take action. It might not be the perfect moment. We may not have the time, money, or staff. However, we need to take that one step to move closer, allowing the next necessary action to reveal itself. Seeing a hot-air balloon festival had been on my list for a while.

It wasn’t until last Wednesday that I saw a picture of the festival. It appeared on the front page of a newspaper, just before I gave a talk at the Bank of Ireland.

That was my prompt to take action, which I did on Sunday. It wasn’t the perfect moment, I wasn’t getting in the basket myself, but what it did was get my wife and kids to realise that it was safe to have a hot-air balloon ride. It got me one step closer to my goal!

Take action, even if the moment isn’t perfect—every small step gets you closer to your goals.

Sometimes we get a phone call, have a meeting with someone, get a flyer, or bump into somebody we haven’t seen in a while. Which prompts us to take action that will get us closer to our goals. We know we should act on it, but our ‘lesser selves’ tell us the time isn’t right and we start to make all sorts of excuses to talk ourselves out of what we truly need to do to move forward, both personally and in business. But what we need to do is take action and make that one step closer, whatever the circumstances.

Where else are you letting opportunities pass you by? You’ve asked for help to get you closer to your goals, your dreams, your desires, but then you refuse to take it. Life is for living – every single moment of it.

What is the one thing you need to do today that will get you closer to your goal?