You may be tired. You may be discouraged. You may be uncomfortable. No matter what, your best option is to move positively forward. Hanging on to past disappointments will only hold you back. Taking comfort in being a victim gives you no real comfort at all. Staying safe by never venturing out, by never taking risks, is the riskiest thing you can do because it guarantees you won’t get anything accomplished.

Your dreams come from your most deeply held values. Those values are yours for a reason. They are yours so that you may fulfill your own unique purpose and possibilities. Your life matters very much. It cannot be replaced and it cannot be duplicated. You are the person who has the privilege of living it, the person who will make it a grand and shining achievement, the person who can fulfill its incredible promise.

It takes effort to move forward through the setbacks and disappointments. It takes courage and determination. Fortunately, you are filled with courage and determination. Yes, you may feel some fear and trepidation. But courage is not the lack of fear. Courage is the ability to feel your fear, to listen to what it has to say, to allow it to prepare you, and to move forward. Determination is surely yours. You know what you desire. You know why you desire it. Just keep those things in your mind and you’ll have plenty of determination. It’s not complicated. It’s within your reach. Go ahead, feel how easy it is to transform your fear into determination. Just take the energy that’s already there, and give it a positive, purposeful focus.

You are filled with valuable experience. The things you’ve done and learned and seen and lived through have left behind a unique and powerful substance of experience which is yours alone. It would be a shame for that to go to waste. It is yours to make use of, yours to build upon, yours from which to grow. By making this present moment count, by tapping into the value of your experience and doing something productive with it, you also make all the past moments count even more. You cannot live in the past, yet you can draw from the value you created there. Invest today’s actions with the wealth of experience you’ve accumulated, and that investment will immediately begin to pay dividends.

You deserve the best. You are worthy of the best. You are capable of the best.

You have a life in front of you that’s waiting to be filled. Whatever has happened in the past in no way prevents you from filling that life to the brim with positive goodness and joy. Right now is completely up to you. Right now is your time to make a choice. Choose to focus on your positive possibilities. Choose to look upward. Choose to look ahead. Put a smile on your face. Stand up, shake yourself off, and step confidently forward. Step forward in the direction of your dreams—yes, your dreams. You owe it to yourself, and you owe it to all the world, to bring those dreams to life. Here is your day. Here is your opportunity. Here is your life. Now, right now, fill it with meaning and purposeful energy.

Move your dream from someday to now.

It’s fun to dream, to think about what you would like to do someday. But that someday part is a real problem. As long as you see your dream as occurring someday, it’s not going to happen for you. Every person who has ever achieved a dream has done so by changing that dream from someday to now.

What’s involved in doing that? Action. There is something you can do right now to begin living your dream. Of course that presents you with a real challenge. Are you serious about your dream or not? Do you truly want to live the reality of it, or do you just want to keep dreaming and wishing and hoping for it your entire life? If you’re serious, there absolutely is something you can do right now, some very definite start you can make today.

Yes, I know about the excuses. You have all sorts of them. After all, if you didn’t have all those excuses you would already be living the full and complete expression of your dream. But you’re not. What enables you to keep your distance from your dream are those very impressive excuses.

There’s not enough time. There’s not enough money. You don’t know anybody who could help you. Something’s holding you back and it’s not your fault. You’re tired. You got off to a slow start. You have a slow metabolism. What else? Do any of these sound vaguely familiar?

The most powerful excuses are the ones that are true. Some excuses are just flat-out lies, and you know it, and those are pretty easy to get beyond. But the excuses that are real and valid and reasonable and true, those have the power to hold you back forever if you let them. The good news is, you don’t have to let them.

Even though you have all sorts of great excuses, you can take action anyway. Even though there are plenty of totally valid reasons for not moving forward, you can move forward anyway. Here’s a really clever way to do that. When you change your dream from someday to now, you can make an offsetting transaction. You can move your excuses from now to someday. Make your dreams and your excuses trade places! Once you do that, the excuses lose all their power. Because you move your excuses to someday, and someday never comes. It’s never someday. It’s always today.

What’s so powerful about this little trick? It transforms the excuses that once held you back into powerful, compelling reasons for moving forward. For example, consider this all-too-common excuse:

“I don’t have enough time.”

Take that excuse and move it from now to someday. Here’s what happens to it:

“Someday I won’t have enough time.”

So far, so good. It’s no longer an excuse that you can use today. But there’s more, and here’s where it gets really interesting. Say the above sentence out loud to yourself. Go ahead. Do it. If there are people around and you’re afraid you might be embarrassed, just whisper it under your breath. But go ahead and say the sentence, “Someday I won’t have enough time.”

Notice that when you say that sentence, it is pretty much impossible to stop at the end of it. The statement demands some kind of resolution. You feel an irresistible urge to put a “so” at the end, and to complete the thought. Go ahead and do it. Add the word “so” and then say whatever naturally comes to mind. Something like this:

“Someday I won’t have enough time, so I’m making full use of the time I have today.”

Not only have you nullified the excuse, you’ve transformed it into a compelling reason to get going. By moving the excuse from now to someday, you’ve changed it from a negative to a positive.

Do you have excuses? Lots of them? Great! Move them all to someday. And with the empty space that’s now cleared out in this present day, put your dreams into action.

Whatever your dream may be, there is something you can do right now, some specific, positive action you can take, that will begin bringing that dream to life. The first step is right in front of you. You have everything it takes, right here, right now, to move your dream from someday to now. That first step will probably be a small one, and might seem insignificant. Yet there is great power in small actions that are repeated again and again.

Move your dream from someday to now.

What do you plan to do someday? Now is when you can go beyond planning and start doing. What dream would you like to be living someday? If it’s good enough for someday, it’s even better for today. Start living it now.

This is excerpted from Ralph Marston’s book, The Power of Ten Billion Dreams.