You’re Not Getting A Letter To Hogwarts
A lot of us start the year with big plans. We hope the following year will be ours, with hopes and dreams we look to manifest into reality. This happens year after year, and we wait for that big thing to happen. Waiting for the big break. Waiting for the right opportunity. Waiting for some external force to swoop in and change our lives overnight. And while patience and time has its place, the reality is that waiting without action is just wasted time. If you want real change, if you want a better life, you’re going to have to put in effort, make sacrifices and work for it.
One of our biggest problems is that we’ve absorbed way too much fiction into our expectations of reality. We idolize characters who get plucked from their mundane lives and dropped into an exciting, extraordinary existence. We identify with the characters who might be considered outcasts or not living up to their potential. They are presumed to be unremarkable until something happens. They find out they are remarkable, they just were in the wrong place. They get whisked off to somewhere totally new and different where they are—in fact— very special, they are good at what they do there. They suddenly live this amazing life that is full of adventure and amazing events. Whether it is a red pill, a rabbit hole or a letter to Hogwarts, we all want this moment to happen to us. So we wait for someone to come along and bestow this amazing change upon us.
This is a fantasy so many people are secretly clinging to. Maybe not literally waiting for an owl to bring them a Hogwarts letter, but waiting for some magical moment when everything just changes. The moment they get discovered. The moment they find their passion without effort. The moment someone rescues them from their struggles and hands them a golden ticket to success and happiness. But here’s the truth: That moment isn’t coming.
They’re not getting a letter to Hogwarts.
Not just because it is a fictional place, but because this idea isn’t grounded in reality. We can point to real life “exceptions” to this rule and idea, and believe if it happened to someone else it can happen to us. And this belief—that success or happiness will just come to us if we want it bad enough—does more harm than good. It breeds passivity. It encourages inaction. And worst of all, it sets us up for disappointment when reality doesn’t live up to their fictional expectations. That with minimal effort, things will just fall into place and we will have everything we want.
This bleeds into what some might consider more realistic fantasies, like Emily in Paris—warping people’s expectations of success. Emily lands a glamorous job in Paris without speaking French, with seemingly no real experience, and stumbles into a dream life where everything just happens to go her way. But real life doesn’t work like that. Landing a job in a foreign country means learning the language, building new skills, and probably work jobs that aren’t Instagram-worthy along the way. With most of your experiences being less than glamorous and more of a grind.
Which is where we need to shift our thinking to.
If we genuinely want a better life, we need to create it for ourselves. That means putting in the effort. That means trying different things, failing, learning, and trying again. It means making sacrifices, whether that’s giving up some comfort now for a better future, working to learn something new and stepping out of our comfort zone to take calculated risks. It means acknowledging that nothing will change unless we change it.
We also need to stop thinking that it will be a grandiose change overnight. That we set out for our big dream idea, and we will simply get it tomorrow. We need to break it down into a more probable next step. View the path totally different and work on the actions needed right now to begin the process of positive change. It might seem daunting at first. Like we will never reach the end point we want to badly. But we can do it. We can lead a better life if we want to. We can enrich it with moments of success and fulfillment at every juncture along the way. We just need to stop waiting, and start doing the work.
Luckily, there is something that can help with just that.
