"Dare To Be Great" My Norwegian Challenge by Robert Yarber

Would you put it all on the line for your dreams? Why is it that some people achieve their wildest dreams and some don’t? To make my dreams come true, I’m willing to do whatever it takes. Being great means achieving whatever it is YOU want to do or be or become. If your goal was to become a mechanic and you went to school for it, learned it, and became that, then you are GREAT! I read a lot and one of the books I own is “The Strangest Secret” by Earl Nightingale. In that book he defines success as “The progressive realization of a worthy ideal. Someone that says “I am going to become this”, and then begins to work towards that goal.

My goal was/is to be a man who lives and works in Norway. North of Norway to be exact. Move there, live there, work there, find love there, have a family there, grow old there, and die there. Pretty specific huh? lol Your own dream should be. Once I get there, of course I have other goals, but I cannot accomplish those before I’m there. Why this is my dream is another story I’ve written you’ll have to check out. I’ll release it after this one. It’s called “Why Norway?”

You have to put in the work. There is no way around it. The work IS your “Dare To Be Great” moment. I wanted to go to Norway but I had no money. How was I gonna get it? For my Norwegian dream, I moved to Alaska. I went to Dutch Harbor and became a Bering Sea Fisherman! I had never even been on a boat before. I even wrote Norway on my Xtra Tuf’s in permanent marker as a constant reminder why the heck I was out here risking my life! Have you ever seen the tv show “Deadliest Catch”? I did THAT!

I got on that boat and I worked my ass off for 20 hours a day for 4 months literally risking my life in order to obtain the funds necessary to move to Norway. It was the absolute hardest thing I have EVER done in my life. Physically, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally. I wanted to quit, of course, but I wanted to go to Norway more. I endured all the sea-sickness, diarrhea, mind tricks, and everything for this dream. I earn the money and then I move! Never having been there I just move. I just a deep belief in what I was doing. I was being drawn to Norway and I had to go. I started studying Norwegian everyday on the Memrise app (and I still do!) and I packed my bags and flew to a country I had never been to before. I had never even been to Europe!

I get to Norway and find a job and my visa gets denied! TWICE! First time because my contract was too little pay so I go back to my employer and even though she doesn’t have to, she gives me the pay raise because she believes in me and my dream. Whew! Right? That was an easy fix. Wrong! My visa gets denied a second time! Ugh. I’ve worked so hard, I don’t understand. My visa gets denied because I applied for my visa from within Norway. Omg! Grrr. I am so close this is crazy! What am I gonna do?

This is where most people would quit. Give up. It was a wild dream in the first place. You gave it a valiant effort. Most people are not me. Most people are not willing to put it all on the line for their dreams. If you want something you’ve never had before, it’s gonna take everything you got! If you could’ve done it with part of what you have, you would’ve already done it! And you don’t want to risk everything because if you fail then you are left with nothing! So you give up. Me? I went harder! You see Norway didn’t say “No” so much as it did tell me exactly what I needed to do for them to say “Yes”. I’m gonna make sure everything is tight on my end so they can’t say no.

Before I apply for a third visa. I move to Ireland. I attend the European Bartender School in Dublin. I do this so I can show the Norwegian government that I am really good at what I do. I don’t have a degree so the only way I’m gonna get a visa anywhere is by being better at something than everyone else. A certificate from EBS shows I know what I’m doing, I’m proficient at it, and I can read and pour drinks in the metric system. Then I take extra classes from a different school in Dublin. Whiskey master class, barista class, beer class, and a bitters class. Then I also take a mixology class! Those are all in person. Awesome right? Norway will say yes now! Nope! Another roadblock. Right as I’m graduating from these 6 weeks worth of classes in Ireland, which is another country I had never been to, I get a message from my employer in Oslo telling me they cannot offer me a contract anymore! I have done everything FOR THIS! This is why I went to Ireland. But there’s a silver lining.

I really want to live in Northern Norway. I chose to move to Oslo because it was the biggest city in Norway and I figured it would be easier to find a job there. I like the cold. I like the arctic circle. I want to live cold and vacation hot. That’s just who I am. So I put the word out and I put feelers out and applications in and contacted people any way I could to get a foot in the door there. I fell in love with Tromsø and then a hiring manager contacted me! He offers me an interview! One problem, I am in the States. I can’t get a visa without a contract and he can’t offer me a contract without having seen me or met me or interviewed me in person. The dream is dead right? Surely this is where you give up! Why? Because to do what it would take to make this happen is crazy and nobody would do that! What does it take?

That would mean spending your own money flying to Tromsø, to another country, then spend money to stay in that country for multiple weeks and interview and prove your worth and why you are the best choice out of an ENTIRE country of people. You do this, in the HOPES of getting a contract offer. This manager could say “No”. There is ZERO guarantee! Then you have to spend money to fly back to the states. It costs $600 to apply for a visa to Norway and I’ve already done that twice. Then when my visa gets approved I have to move there and spend more money to fly there and also find a place a place while working a brand new job. THIS is literally my dream. I am obviously driven mad by it. So I am willing to risk everything to make it happen. Whatever it takes.

I am not a rich man. If you’ve read my story then you would understand that I’ve come from nothing. Out of the dust of destruction of my bad choices in life, I had nothing. Obviously, living in this country and that country and flying around everywhere takes time and money. I’ve made 11 hour plane rides, I’ve made 14 hour plane rides. Multiple times. That means I’ve had to take jobs in grass seed warehouses, lumber mills, homesteads, cleaning houses, retail clothing stores, selling cars, bartended here, bartended there, basically anything I could do temporarily to save some money up and then leave. Since that was the case, relationships are out. It’s very hard to be in one country with a dream to be in another one and try to be in a relationship! To achieve your great dream you will have to be selfish at times, lots of times. If you have a partner or children then that means you have other people to think about in your decisions. I don’t have those things things yet for all the reasons I’ve just said and so this is the exact time to chase my dreams. I don’t want to be old and know I was on the cusp of making my dreams come true and didn’t even try because I was scared!

If you try and fail, at least you know! You did everything you could’ve done and there is no shame in that. If you never try then you never know and you always say “I could’ve made it”. Thats a lie because if you could’ve made it, you would’ve made it! This is your life dream right? So you are trying to tell me that you could’ve achieved your life dream but just CHOSE not to? Malarky! I’m calling you out because that’s not true. You gave up! You got scared and you gave in to whatever you had to for safety and security. Chasing your dreams is SCARY and it is NOT very secure! I’m not gonna lie to you. To me though, the regret of having not chased them, is scarier.

So here I stand today, waiting for the border of Norway to open back up, so I can dare to be great. This is years in the making with a singular focus. This has literally taken me all across the world and I was there in Norway! I was already there and I know how amazing it is. That hurts even more. I tell you what though, I’ve become a better man. I am for damn sure a better bartender than I was when I first applied. That’s a win-win right? lol They say there is no such thing as luck. Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. Well, opportunity awaits me and you can bet your ass I’ll be prepared.

Now tell me, how bad do you want your dreams? What are you wiling to do?

Where I'm from and where I’m going. I wrote it on my Xtra Tuf boots so that anytime I got tired or discouraged and I looked down I would see the reason that I was here.

When I first got to Dutch Harbor, Alaska, I had a warehouse job on an assembly line with a lot of crab. It sucked, but it was what I had to do.

And as unbelievable as it seems, this bar right here is the one I was when my life was changed forever. Inside this bar, this NORWEGIAN bar, I met the deck boss and first mate that would offer me a job on their boat and take a chance on the greenest of green horns!

I had NO idea what I was gonna go through on this boat. No idea how hard I was gonna have to work.

I was really out there risking my life everyday. For this dream of mine, I did that. Who wants it more than me?

"Dare To Be Great." My Norwegian Challenge.