There are so many ways to envision your future, but none more effective than actually putting it into writing, or even presenting it in picture form. Dreamboarding is the act of collating everything you want for yourself into one space that you can keep looking back to, effectively reminding yourself of what it is you truly want. Ken and Kerri Courtright discuss the benefits of having this kind of dreamboard for you, your family, and your business. This is a method that’s helped at least fifteen billionaires achieve their goals and dreams. If you aren’t putting down your goals and dreams, they just don’t feel as real, so start today!
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Are You Dreamboarding
This episode is titled Are You Dream Boarding? Meaning at home, in your bedroom, office, study, basement or wherever you have your own personal quiet time. Do you have a dream board where you have in picture form exactly where you want to go in life? We have a special guest. Her name is Kerri Courtright. She is my infamous and quite often famous wife of I don’t know how many years. A little bit about Kerri, she is awesome. I met Kerri in 1988. It was to say love at first sight, is an understatement. I can prove that. She walked into class in college, turned to the guy to my left who I went to high school with and I said, “I am dating that girl.” Because my self-image was massive, Kerri had to ask me out on a date. As we know, the rest is history. It’s an exciting stuff. Kerri is now an elected official. In her past life, she used to be a Chicago Bulls cheerleader. She’s ran many famous people’s campaigns. Not only was she asked to run for state rep but to throw her hat in the ring for Congress. It was cool and exciting to have a semi-celebrity in the studio.
Let’s get back to the show. This is called, “Are You Dream Boarding?” There’s a reason for that. If you read a lot of uber-successful autobiographies, I’ve read 15 to 20 billionaires’ autobiographies, most of them, some are biographies. I don’t know if I have come across any that don’t mention somewhere some form of a dream board or written goals posted on a wall, pictures and different things like this. We can go back to the famous book written in 1936 called Think and Grow Rich, where one of the chapters starts out, “Isn’t it amazing that a man with definiteness of purpose goes through life and watches how the world steps aside and comes beside and even helps him with his aims?”
I’m going to say this and I’m going to turn it over to my beautiful bride, Kerri. If you don’t have goals in writing, it’s my opinion that you’re afraid of them. They’re not real. If you have goals in writing, you can read many famous books. You can read a lot and you can watch a lot of different movies, shows and documentaries that will prove there is something magical about putting a dream and a goal in writing, and literally creating an attack plan to get it. As you probably noticed in your life often, as you’re going to find out when I come back on this, you might put together a written goal or a dream board. You could even forget you’ve done it and trip over certain things. At this point, I’m going to turn it over to Kerri. I’m going to come back on and share a personal example of something that happened in our life many years ago. Here’s Kerri.
Don't say what you want to do for the rest of your life; say how you want to live. Click To TweetHow often do you hear or you’re asked when you’re a kid, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” How on earth are you supposed to know what you want to do for the rest of your life? In school, you probably had teachers that would bring out books and they’d show you, “You could be a fireman.” Never does it say you could be the fire chief. You could be a teacher. Why not a professor? You could be a nurse. Why can’t I be a brain surgeon? Even as adults, when we were younger, people would ask us, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” That’s a big loaded question because they’re asking for the direction of the rest of your life and whatever you start to think about, that’s what you’re going to do.
What we do is we believe in dream boards. Dream boards keep your dreams in front of you as well as it helps you to find a path to get there. My question to you would not be, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” It’s, “What do you want to do with your life when you got grown-up or even now as you’ve grown up?” A dream board lets you put together all the things that you would like to have or do. This isn’t necessarily about tangible items. It’s also hypothetically about larger items. Do you want to donate? Do you want to travel? Do you want to be a part of something bigger? Do you want to expand your business? You might want to drive the coolest car around and that’s okay because it’s your dream. It’s not somebody else’s dream. Your dream is what keeps you going, but you need to have them in front of you.
What we do with our kids is we have dream boards for each of them. What we do is we asked, “Don’t tell me what you want to do for the rest of your life. Tell me how you want to live.” Our kids will put up pictures. One of our children wants to travel. We say, “You want to travel. What do you like to do?” She likes to write and work on the computer. Those are things that you can do and travel. She could be a travel writer. She could own a tech company and travel the world. You could work wherever your computer is. She gets to travel because she’s working in a different field. She’s writing or she’s working in tech. You might want to drive a Bugatti. What do you need to do in your life to be able to own a Bugatti?
We have a daughter who wants to be an attorney, so she has a path. She’s young, but she knows if that’s the car that she’d like to drive, she has to get good grades now. She should get into a great college and get into a fabulous law school to be in the top. She can get recruited by a great law firm and eventually be a partner. That’s the path that she wants. She wants to be an attorney. She’s not just going to be a lawyer. She wants to be a partner in a large firm because that’s her vehicle. She thinks at a young age to get her Bugatti. A dream board keeps your dreams in front of you and helps you find your path to get them.
In the last dream board session we did, we went to the store and bought six dream boards. When you are used to doing dream boards, it is an amazing sight. All of our kids sat down within the hour, picked up a whole bunch of magazines as well as went onto the computer. The cutest thing is our youngest because we have four children. He only wants to be a YouTuber. His was pretty fast. He put that on his dream board. That’s okay. At least our son is dreaming about what he wants to do for the rest of his life and he has a path to get there.
I saw his dream board. It was simple but that’s his dream. As we say in this house, “This is my dream. Leave it alone. Do not knock my dream. Get your own dream.” I wanted to bring something up. It was awesome. I was going through my closet and we have moved a couple of times in the last years. I found a dream board that Kerri and I made many moons ago. It was quite a long time ago. Our company is several years old. We started it in March of 1992 and my brother’s been with us since 1996. We have a number of people that have been with us since 2000. We’re up to 85 employees. In our first ten years, we had some tumultuous ups and downs. I want to set the stage. I found a dream board that Kerri and I created many years ago.
Your dream is what keeps you going, but you need to have them in front of you. Click To TweetI’ll describe the dream board. On the dream board, on the top left is a picture of a 747-jet airplane. The top right is some 60, 70, 80-foot yacht like a cabin cruiser. There’s a speedboat right below that. Right at the top middle is a picture of a massive three-story home. It’s all white, a lot of pillars, huge backyard and there was a pool. There was a bunch of diamond, jewelry, necklace, many pictures of rings, beautiful clothing and fancy shoes. There was a pair of gym shoes in a locker. I didn’t understand what that was but it was a cool dream board. You could tell at first glance that it was all about travel, lifestyle, beautiful home, backyard and spending time with your family on a deck. I remember there was a big pool at the bottom left.
Here’s what’s crazy about this. We made this dream board with this mini-mansion, these expensive cars and huge SUV when we couldn’t wait to be broke. We had three companies doing multiple millions, but because of certain circumstances, our average checkbook balance was negative $3,000. It was under zero. If we went to get gas in the car, we had no idea if we could put gas in the car and yet our company was doing seven figures a year. It was a crazy time and I remember going out to eat was not an option. It was ugly, yet we knew back then that if you don’t have a dream board, you don’t have much. If you don’t have a point on a map of where you’re going, how can the GPS get you there?
Even think of Uber. They don’t want to pick you up if you don’t have a destination. Back to the dream board. Here’s what’s crazy. I pulled out this dream board and I know exactly where we were sitting when we were pulling out the pictures for this dream board. We were sitting in a home that we were in for seventeen years. We had a gravel driveway. Our garage was a one-car garage leaning over. It was not painted. It was ugly looking to say the least. Our front porch was literally falling off the house. We had holes in our windows. We had three kids at the time. It was a little bitty bungalow in Joliet, Illinois where we stayed for seventeen years to save up and we made this dream board.
When you compare the dream board to our lifestyle at the time, to say that was a high contrast would be an understatement. Here’s what’s awesome. This is the power of knowing what you want and knowing what you’re willing to give up to get it. I pulled out the dream board and let me remind you that when we built this, we were broke. We had a tiny bungalow, and the grass wasn’t even worth cutting and it was ugly, but we still cut it anyway for respect to the neighbors. We dream board it when we had virtually nothing, but everything I mentioned, the jets, we travel all the time. The boats, we have the best boat on our private ski lake that we live on now.
We live on a three-story home on a private lake with a massive backyard. We have literally everything on that dream board except the pool in the backyard. Give Kerri twelve more months and we’ll have the pool in the backyard. What is the point? Is the point we got all this stuff on our dream board? No, the point is, we built the dream board many years before we saw the physical manifestation of it. Quite frankly, we lost the dream board in the move. I don’t know if it went to an attic temporarily or got stuck behind a bunch of other things but we lost it. For a period of time, this dream board was up on my office wall in that small home for a couple of years and we stared at it.
My question to you is, do you have the guts to get out a blank 2×3-foot piece of white foam board, white cork board or white poster board and open some magazines and ask yourself, “If the world was a blank canvas and I had an unlimited wallet, what do I want with my life?” Kerri said, “It isn’t the material things. It’s about what do you want to do with your life.” Where do you want to be? Who do you want to be? Do you want to retire your parents? Take pictures of your parents, put it on the board and put a date when you’re going to retire them. Do you want a safe vehicle? That’s why we put those pictures on our board. We wanted a safe car. Do you want to travel? Why? There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s your dream. Find out what your dream is. Get it on the board and keep that board in front of you. At least you’ve got to put it in your closet, your bathroom or somewhere that you and only you see a couple of times a day and you think on it and you dwell on it. Do you have any last-minute thoughts?
No one has the right to take your dream away because someone else's dream is different than yours. Click To TweetYou act on it. It’s all you can do. Keep having it up there because that’s you and that’s your dream. No one has the right to take your dream away because someone else’s dream is different than yours. That’s okay. Keep moving towards your dream and you will get there. It might be a reminder every single day and that’s all right. Keep going. It’s awesome. It’s a great life when you get there.
For our loyal audience, you know I had an episode talking about Walt Disney in the ‘50s getting a plaque from the White House saying, “World’s Biggest Dreamer.” Back then, it was one of the greatest compliments. Now, it’s more of a cutdown, “Get your head out of the clouds, stop being a dreamer, get a job.” You know that I gag when I hear the word job. You need jobs. We employ 85 people and we’re proud of that. We tell all 85 people, “This is a temporary means of income until your business takes off. This is a resume builder for you. Don’t get stuck here.” For Today’s Growth: Growing Business Today, I am Ken Courtright.
I am Kerri Courtright.
We will see you all on the trail. Keep dreaming. See you.
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