Hollywood loves zombie movies and TV shows. Zombies are the reanimated corpses that stagger about in search of human flesh to consume. Zombies are often called the “walking dead” because even though they can walk just like a regular person, they're brain-dead inside, so their movements are purely mechanical.

While zombie movies and TV shows may be scary, there's an even more frightening type of zombie that you can see around you every day. These type of zombies may not eat human flesh nor are they reanimated bodies of people who have already died. The zombies I'm talking about are people who are the true walking dead.

These real zombies are people who never take a chance, never make a stand, never make a choice, and ultimately, never really live. You may have seen these people before. In the words of Henry David Thoreau, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

That's because far too many people wait for life to come to them rather than actively going out and grabbing the life they want to lead for themselves. When you passively wait for life to come to you, you'll probably be waiting a lifetime.

Everyone knows of the man who could have made a fortune if only they had made the right choice. Everyone knows of the woman who could have been a success if she had only kept going. Everyone knows somebody full of talent, loaded with skills, and blessed with good luck, who still wound up living a life of mediocrity.

The biggest tragedy isn't that people are starving, lacking health care, or suffering from poverty. The biggest tragedy is when someone fails to realize all the wonderful gifts they truly possess and yet refuse to believe they even have them. Without ever finding their passion and embracing their principles, these people are the true horrors of the world.

Fortunately once you identify your passion and define your principles, you won't have to live a life of quiet desperation. That's because passion helps you decide what you want to do. Then your principles help you define how you're going to take action:

• Action can get you started.
• Action can keep you moving a little bit closer toward your goal every day.
• Action can get you back on track when obstacles and interruptions get in your way.
• Action is the only way you'll ever reach any dream. You'll never achieve anything worthwhile by just wishing for it. You can only achieve anything worthwhile by getting out of your comfort zone and taking a chance that you could fail.

The secret to success is paved with failure, and the only way you can overcome failure is to keep taking action to make your life better a little bit at a time. It may never be easy, but in the long run, it will always be worth it by giving your life purpose and meaning.

FEAR: THE IMAGINARY OBSTACLES

The biggest reason most people never pursue their passion is fear. It's not that they don't have enough money. It's not that they don't have enough education or knowledge. It's not even that they don't know how to get started. People fail because they let fear control their lives.

Actor Robert Pattinson, who appeared in the Twilight series, said, “I used to get so paralyzed with anxiety before auditions I just couldn't do anything.”

Surprisingly, many A-list actors have experienced stage fright during auditions, performing on stage, or acting in front of the camera. The difference between success and failure is as simple as refusing to let fear stop them from trying anyway. Courage isn't the absence of fear but acknowledging your fears and doing what you want to do because the rewards are far greater than not doing anything at all.

The most common fear is the fear of failure, which can mean anything from fear of embarrassing yourself in front of others, fear of losing all your money, or fear of not knowing what to do. When you fear failure, you might think it's safer not to try at all. Of course if you don't try, you've already failed.

If you're afraid of failing, your fear of failure can hold you back. Rather than boldly strive forward to get what you want, fear of failure can make you hesitate. When you hesitate, you'll risk substituting bold action for timid steps that feel safer to avoid committing yourself completely. While tiny steps are better than no steps at all, at some point in your journey, you're going to have to take a big leap forward, and a timid little step just isn't going to get you there.

Just remember that fear can never hold you back. What's really stopping you is you and your own imagination.

Fear is nothing more than a negative, imaginary outcome. In other words, fear is the belief of what could go wrong, but it is not the certainty that anything could go wrong.

Every time you let fear get in your way, you're really imagining the worst possible outcome and believing it's not only going to come true, but it's much larger and more frightening than it could ever be:

• Maybe you'll go broke. (Can you picture yourself living on the streets with your family and slowly starving to death?)
• Maybe you'll get hurt. (Can you imagine breaking every bone in your body and not being able to get to a hospital?)
• Maybe you'll look foolish. (Can you imagine the whole world laughing at you?)
• Maybe you'll lose respect. (Can you imagine being shunned by everyone around you for the rest of your life?)
• Maybe you'll even die. (Can you imagine the most horrible death possible?)

Not only does fear imagine the absolute worse possible outcome, but fear exaggerates the possible dire consequences of what could possibly go wrong. When you let fear overwhelm you, you're no longer dealing with real problems that you can solve. Instead, you're facing an imaginary monster that can never be killed because it feeds off your thoughts to keep getting bigger and stronger.

When fear runs rampant in your imagination, it's easy to give up on your dreams just to make that fear go away.

If you let that happen, you're letting an imaginary obstacle stop you from accomplishing a real goal. That's no different from being afraid to sleep at night because you think there's a monster hiding in the closet.

Here's how fear works. It scares you once, and if you let it succeed, it grows a little bigger and comes back again. Each time you run away from it, it gets bigger and comes right back at you once more. Ultimately, you have to make a decision. Will you keep endlessly running away from your fear and letting fear control your life? Or will you face your fear and deal with it, no matter what happens?

What's the easy way? Keep running. What's the hard way? Stand up and face your fear knowing that it could defeat you.

But if you keep running away from your fear, it's already defeated you. Given a choice between letting you fears defeat you or taking the chance to confront and overcome your fear, what will you do? The choice boils down to whether you're going to accept certain defeat, or whether you're going to take a chance for possible victory.

Ultimately, you have to ask yourself, am I going to let fear control the rest of my life or am I going to take control of my own life? If you're not willing to let other people control your life, why would you let your own fears do it instead?

GETTING STARTED ANYWAY

Fear will never go away. Even the most experienced Broadway actors and musicians selling out entire stadiums feel fear before the curtain rises. Taylor Swift talks to herself in the mirror to calm herself down before going on stage and repeatedly tells herself that “it's going to be okay.” The only difference between fear and courage is that fearful people let their fears stop them, while courageous people feel fear but go ahead and do what they want anyway.

Singer Lorde said that her stage fright can get so severe that she actually gets sick. “I, like, totally threw up before my show last night. I am reduced by nerves. I can be completely crushed by feelings of all kinds … I get nervous, I get freaked out, I get, you know, the usual stuff.”

Actress Jennifer Lawrence said, “I never feel like, ‘I've got this.’ I'm always very nervous and aware of how quickly people can hate you and that scares me.”

Opera singer Andrew Bocelli said, “Stage fright is my worst problem … So there's always this fear, because you feel naked. There's a fear of not reaching up to expectations.”

Singer Donny Osmond said, “I know when I walk out there, I'm not going to give the best performance. I'll make a mistake. I'll trip. I'll do something stupid. But it's OK; you pick up and just move on.”

If major celebrities who make a living performing in front of audiences still feel fear after so many years of performing, just realize that it's okay if you do, too.

Fear is uncomfortable, but it's a reminder that you're alive.

When you ride a roller coaster, those sharp turns, steep drops, wild loops, and out-of-control speeds may make you scream in terror. But you ride that roller coaster precisely to experience that feeling of fear.

Imagine going to an amusement park and never getting on any roller coasters. At the end of the night when the park shuts down, how do you think you'd feel if you had spent the entire day doing nothing at all? You may not have experienced any fear, but neither did you experience any fun, either.

Just remember that fear is part of life. The more you try to eliminate fear from your life, the more you'll cut yourself off from making your life worth living. The only people who have completely eliminated all uncertainty and fear from their lives are the people buried in a cemetery.

Since you can't completely eliminate fear, what you can do is use fear as motivation. If your fears tell you that you might get hurt, move forward anyway but take extra care to protect yourself from physical harm.

If your fears tell you that you might go broke, move forward anyway but create plans for protecting your money. Once you acknowledge your fears and immediately address them, you minimize that fear so it can't paralyze you into inaction.

Remember, if you're not feeling fear, you're probably not doing anything worthwhile in the first place.

DEALING WITH OBSTACLES

No matter what you decide to do with your life, you're going to run into obstacles. The simplest type of obstacles are physical. For example, if you want to pursue a career in country music, you'll probably need to move to Nashville, Tennessee. If you want to pursue a career as a surfer, you can't do that in Iowa or North Dakota. Instead, you'll need to move where the waves are such as California, Hawaii, or Australia.

Physical obstacles challenge you to break out of your comfort zone and do something different. That could be as simple as starting a new habit such as learning how to paint or sing, or it can be much bigger such as forcing you to move to a new location where you don't know anybody in an unfamiliar city.

Doing something new is always scary, because any time you do something new, you'll likely make mistakes. Think of when you learned to ride a bicycle. At first, you probably feared you would fall. As you learned to control the bike, you started getting more confident, and that confidence most likely led you to see what you could do, which likely led to more mistakes.

You can't learn anything new without making mistakes. If we really feared making mistakes, we'd all still be crawling around on all fours for fear of falling if we ever tried to stand up.

The biggest challenge from physical obstacles isn't just the problems they create, but the changes that they force to overcome that problem. It might take time and money, but anyone can overcome physical obstacles such as moving to New York or Los Angeles to break into show business. The hard part is actually doing it.

Physical obstacles force you to change your life by changing your habits, but they are actually the easiest obstacles to overcome. If you want to move to Hollywood to break into acting, it's fairly straightforward to pack your bags and move to Los Angeles.

The second, and far more challenging, type of obstacles, are those created by other people, most of whom sincerely have your best interests at heart. Obstacles created by others challenge your own trust in yourself. When a parent, friend, or relative tells you that your dream is unrealistic, you may get a little defensive. But what happens if several people tell you the same thing? What if absolutely no one you know believes in you or your dream?

You can't just raise a little more money to overcome this obstacle. There's a huge emotional and psychological barrier blocking your way. When people around you try to discourage you from your dream, it's only natural to doubt whether your dream is worth pursuing at all.

Stop. First, ask yourself why someone might be trying to discourage you. In many cases, people have their own agendas. They might want you to pursue their dreams instead of your own. Once you understand someone's agenda for trying to discourage you, it makes it much easier to overcome their objections.

Second, people might want to “protect” you by steering you away from something risky toward something that appears more achievable and safer. There's no guaranteed path to becoming a singer or an entrepreneur, but there is a much clearer path to becoming an accountant or taking over the family business. When people want you to choose something safer and more predictable, they're really asking you to choose a life that they think is best for you, not what you think is best for you.

Although these people might truly care about you and wish to protect you from getting hurt, following their advice risks choosing a life you don't really want and that will never make you happy. It might make you comfortable, but it will never emotionally satisfy your soul.

Ask yourself: Would you rather risk being free and getting hurt, or hiding in a cage to guarantee you'll never get hurt but that you'll never be happy either?

Perhaps the scariest obstacles from other people come from those who truly love you but are afraid of change themselves. Are you willing to pursue your dream at the risk of leaving someone behind? Are you willing to chase your passion, knowing that if you fail, someone you love will suffer from your failure as well? It's hard enough to risk your own life, but it's twice as hard to ask someone you love to risk their own life with yours.

Keep in mind that if people truly love you, they'll understand your desire. If they refuse to understand, you have to decide what's worth more: your relationship with that person or your passion?

You can have your dream and keep your relationships with your loved ones intact, but if someone refuses to acknowledge your dream and refuses to help you find a way to achieve your dream, you need to ask if that person truly cares and loves you after all.

A person without a dream risks being nothing more than an empty shell. If you sacrifice your dream for another person, your dream may still burn within your heart. Will that create resentment? Anger? Sadness? Depression?

You need to decide what's more important, your dream or your relationship. It may not be an easy decision, but only you know the answer. Once you find that answer, embrace that decision with all your heart and move on with your life wherever it may take you.

Remember, physical obstacles force you to change the way you live. People obstacles force you to confront your relationships with others. Yet the greatest obstacle you'll ever face will come from your own doubt.

Everyone doubts themselves, even celebrities, billionaire entrepreneurs, and top athletes. You may not think you have what it takes, you're not smart enough, you're not good enough, you don't deserve to succeed, you don't have the right look, you're not young (or old) enough, you don't know what you're doing. Your mind can create a million excuses, and that flood of self-doubt can threaten even the strongest will in the world.

Whenever you're facing self-doubt, always remember that whatever self-doubt you might have, there's no way of knowing whether you have a particular weakness unless you test it. If you just assume you're not good enough, then you'll act like you're not good enough, and that ends in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Self-doubt can only strangle your dreams if you give it that power.

However, if you fear you might not be good enough, stop and ask yourself, is that really true? Banish the false self-doubts that might be nagging you. Don't let a lie sabotage your dreams.

Remember, there are always two sides to every self-doubt. If you think you're not good enough at something, look for ways to get better. If you think you're not old (or young) enough, you can always find a place where you do fit in. Don't dwell on the negatives. Once you examine your self-doubts, you'll find that they can prod you into taking action that can increase your chances of success in the long run.

CHANGING YOUR MIND

There's a famous short story by Frank R. Stockton called “The Lady or the Tiger?” In this story, a man is given a choice between opening one of two doors. Behind one door is a lady whom he must marry. Behind the second door is a ferocious tiger that will kill him.

To help this man decide which door to open, he looks in the stands at his lover, a princess who knows which door holds the lady and which door holds the tiger. This princess points to the door on the right – but there's a problem.

The princess hates the lady behind the door and can't bear the thought of her lover marrying this other woman. However, the princess also loves the man forced to choose between two doors, so will she want to see him mauled to death by a man-eating tiger?

This story shows that making decisions is never easy, because you never know if you're making the right choice. To avoid this, many people would rather avoid making any decision at all, but procrastination simply means wasting time – and who knows how much time any of us have left in our lives?

In “The Lady or the Tiger?” story, the man must make a choice. He can only make one choice. If he makes the wrong choice, he'll die. Fortunately, most choices you'll face will never be this final. Instead, any time you make a choice, you can always change your mind afterward.

If you suddenly decide to move to Los Angeles to break into show business but find you don't like it, guess what? You can always change your mind and do something else. Maybe you still like acting, but prefer to go into theater instead, pursue acting as a hobby, or get involved in a different aspect of acting such as working as an agent or as a promoter to other actors.

If you go to college to become a doctor but decide you aren't that interested in medical school after all, you can always choose something else. Maybe you'd rather be a paramedic, a nurse, a dentist, or some other career related to the medical field. If your passion is true, you just need to find the right way to pursue it.

Steven Spielberg dreamed about becoming a director so he applied to the University of Southern California's film school, but was turned down. Undaunted, Spielberg went to California State University to study film instead.

However, he got an unpaid intern job at Universal Studios, and while working at Universal Studios, he got the chance to make a short film that impressed the studio executives. That's when Universal Studios awarded Spielberg a seven-year directing contract. Needless to say, he decided to drop out of college.

If you've truly found your passion, you'll never want to give it up. However, you may follow one path only to find that choice isn't working for you. Rather then give up on your passion, give up on your current path and look for a new one to continue pursuing your dream.

If you give up on your dream, you were never passionate about it in the first place. If you've found your passion, you'll never give it up, but you may change your mind on how you'll try to satisfy your passion.

There is no single “right” way to fulfill your passion. The only right way is the way that ultimately gets you where you want to go, and that path will be different for everybody.

STAY FOCUSED

When you know your passion and have found a path to help you fulfill it, the next step is focus. Focus means keeping your eye on your desired goal. That means stripping away anything that may distract and slow you down from pursuing your dream.

Time is crucial for achieving any goal, so the more time you spend pursuing your dream, the faster your progress will be. Five steps can help you stay focused:

1. Schedule time for your own well-being. You can't succeed in any goal if you're sick or exhausted. Even though billionaire Richard Branson runs multiple companies, he makes exercise a daily priority because he values his fitness and health. Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook, said he regretted not exercising and eating better because he would have achieved success even faster without the health problems he had to overcome.
2. Schedule time for your loved ones. Billionaire Sheryl Sandberg said that she makes sure to leave work at 5:30 every night so she can be home, because her children are her priority. Founder and former CEO of Intel, Andy Grove, would also consistently leave work at 6:30 each night, regardless of any problems within the company, because he wanted to be home for dinner.
3. Schedule time to pursue your dream. Apple's CEO Tim Cook regularly wakes up at 3:45 a.m., while former Disney CEO, Bob Iger, woke up at 4:30 a.m. By getting up so early, you can have large blocks of uninterrupted time to think, return email messages, exercise, and plan your day. If you don't schedule time every day to move one step closer to your dream, it's far too easy to let daily activities interfere and distract you until there's no time left at all.
4. Eliminate anything that interferes with your first three priorities: your health, your family, and your dream. You want all your daily activities to move you in the same direction. If you exercise every morning but spend your lunch eating junk food, you're working against yourself and slowing down your own progress.
5. Avoid multitasking. Trying to do two or more things at once might seem efficient, but when you do two things at once, you likely won't do either task very well. A Stanford University study found that when people multitask, they're more easily distracted and have a harder time transitioning between tasks than people who focus on one task at a time. Multitasking creates the illusion of efficiency but actually gives you nothing but the reality of performing two or more tasks poorly. If a task is worth doing, it's worth doing well. If a task isn't worth doing well, it's probably not worth doing at all.

   Famous martial artist and movie star Bruce Lee said, “The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.” That means anyone can succeed in anything they choose to do, just as long as they remain committed to achieving their goal.

Your daily schedule gives you the freedom to take control over your life. You just need to set aside the time to do it right now.

REMEMBER YOUR PASSION

If you think creating and maintaining a schedule feels too cumbersome and time-consuming, think of it as simply a tool to help you get what you want. If you wanted to travel from Los Angeles to Berlin, it might be a hassle to get through airport security and cram yourself in an airplane, but you do it because it's the fastest way to get to where you want to go.

Likewise, you create routines and define schedules because it's the fastest way to get you where your passion is taking you. You likely need to do many unpleasant or annoying tasks to achieve your dream, but in the end, it will all be worth it.

Your passion is the driving force that can help you overcome doubt and fear so you'll even get started. When people feel the energy behind your drive, they'll be attracted by your passion and that attraction can put you in touch with people who can help you toward your dream.

David Lucatch, founder and CEO of Yappn Corporation, a real-time translation service, said, “The people I have seen achieve the greatest success in their professional and personal lives are passionate people that lead, support, and mentor others with that ‘zeal and zest’ for the work and people.”

Dr. Dre, the rapper who co-founded Beats, a company that was acquired by Apple, had this to say about talent in music and business, “You can learn it. But in order to be good at it, to be really great at it, it has to be in you.”

Passion not only gives your life direction, but also helps act as a guide to make sure you stay on track. The minute you stray from your passion, you know you're making a mistake and need to change course to get back on track in a way that aligns with your passion. Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, said “If we compromise who we are to achieve higher profits, what have we achieved?”

When problems inevitably arise, passion will give you the energy to keep going no matter how great the setbacks may be. Without passion, you have nothing. With passion, you have everything.

Never forget your passion. It's what literally drives your life forward.

TAKE A LEAP OF FAITH

At some point in your life, you're going to be faced with a decision that only you can make. What's worse is that you'll need to make this life-altering decision using incomplete information with no guarantees for the outcome. What will you do?

That's when you need to carefully examine your choices and look at which option speaks to your heart. Then close your eyes, take a deep breath, and go for it regardless of the consequences or hardships ahead of you.

That's scary. That's unpredictable, but it's also liberating because letting go of your fears means you may be putting faith in yourself for the first time in your life. Just remember, no matter what you do, it likely will never be the end of the world. If you make a choice for all the right reasons, it may not turn out the way you want or expect, but it will give you tremendous confidence in yourself, and that's the greatest feeling in the world.

What happens if you never trust yourself and always play it safe? You'll likely go through life always wondering what could have been. Then each time another life-altering decision appears, you'll risk shying away from it until you never make any important decisions at all.

Watch any great movie and you'll notice a common factor. The hero always controls his or her own fate. Regardless of what obstacles get in the way, heroes find a way to overcome and emerge victorious, but that first step always involves taking a giant leap of faith into an unknown world.

Be the hero in your own life. At some point, life will force you to make a decision. Play it safe or take a chance. What will you do? What would your favorite movie hero do?

One final word of advice. Don't compare yourself to others. This is not a race or a competition. If someone else achieves a goal like yours, that doesn't mean you can't get there, too. Life is not a zero-sum game where someone must lose in order for someone else to win.

In life, everyone can win. If you're going to compare yourself to anyone, compare yourself to your old self from the past. This will let you measure who you are now and who you were a day, a week, a month, or a year ago. By making steady progress, you can see how much further you've come compared to your past self in another time.

When you compare yourself to others, it's easy to get depressed or feel envy or jealousy. When you compare yourself to yourself, it's much easier to feel happy about what you have accomplished. Focus your energy on becoming a better version of yourself. As noted writer Oscar Wilde said, “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

Ultimately, the secret to happiness lies in taking action to pursue your passion, spending time with the people you love, and focusing on the present because that's the only moment any of us ever have, and the present is the only place where you can experience happiness.

No matter what you do with your life, you'll always have to find your own way because no one has ever faced the exact same circumstances as you. As American poet Muriel Strode (August 1903 edition of The Open Court periodical) said, “I will not follow where the path may lead, but I will go where there is no path, and I will leave a trail.”

Takeaway: The only way to get what you want is to take action. Emotional obstacles can be much more difficult to overcome than physical obstacles because you often need to overcome your own doubts. Schedule time to pursue your dream and be sure to practice gratitude to remind yourself of your successes every day. No matter what you do, you'll need to find your own way to success.