“Well, here’s the thing,” [a travel magazine editor] told me. “Many of our readers don’t actually want to travel. They just want to think of themselves as travelers.”

Wow. They don’t want to travel… they just want to pretend.

I probably shouldn’t have been so surprised. Many people say they want to write a book, but most of them don’t follow through. Maybe some of them don’t want to write—they just want to call themselves a writer. They want to have written a book.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Might as well dream a little!

But if you really want to do something—not just dream about it—then you have to go beyond reading travel magazines or thinking about the book you’re not writing. You can’t be an impostor traveler. You can’t live your life through the lens of aspiration.

—Chris Guillebeau