Achieving Life Dreams

In life coaching, they talk about clearly defining your dream and transforming that dream into smaller goals to help achieve the dream. In the business world, there is a lot of talk about goal setting and taking massive action to accomplish those goals. In some circles, you’ll hear or read about ladder jumping, creating your own hierarchy, in order to achieve what you want to achieve.

I have long separated my world of “dreams” from that of “goals”. For me, “goals” have always been specifically related to business, as they need to be measurable in order to be achievable. On the flip side, I’ve long looked at “dreams” as something very hard to measure. I, like a lot of people I’ll bet, view dreams as almost unattainable.

Let’s take a quick look at very related, yet very different, versions of a goal and a dream. Somebody may set the goal of writing a novel, and another person may have a dream of making their living as a professional novelist. These are two vastly different things we’re talking about here. Anybody can write a novel. Yes, even you. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world do it every November, as part of the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) project. Write 1,667 words per day for the entire month of November, and bam…you have a 50,000 word piece, the minimum length considered adequate to be called a novel. Quality? Who cares! Just write! That’s the theme of NaNoWriMo. And it’s really not that hard. I’ve participated three times – finished my first year, almost finished the second year, and got way sidetracked last year.

The dream of being a professional novelist, on the other hand, requires a LOT more work, diligence, effort, and planning. 99.9% of NaNoWriMo novels produced straight up suck, and everybody knows it. A novel for mass publication can’t suck…Quality matters. On top of that, there is the whole matter of getting it published, marketing it, getting good reviews, etc. Then, once you’ve done this, you have to do it again. And then again, then again. That’s what is involved with becoming a professional novelist. I couldn’t find accurate statistics online for purposes of this article, but I’m willing to bet that the odds of making a living as a novelist are worse than making a living as a professional athlete.

Does that mean that dreams can’t be reached? Absolutely not. But how can this be? Because people achieve their dreams every single day! We are awash with stories on a daily basis of individuals that strived for only one thing their entire lives, and achieved it. To be completely honest, such stories are commonplace. Some people do it early in life and make it look easy, some do it after decades of struggle.

There’s a girl I figure skate with that illustrates this quite well. She recently told me that being a model is her dream in life. I think she’s 15 or 16 years old, and she’s already had some modeling work, and it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if she already has an agency or manager. I also wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to see her in some national marketing campaign for an apparel line or a clothing store sometime in the next few years. Although her life’s work so far, as it may be, has more to do with figure skating than anything else (she’s pretty good at that, too), her dream, her drive, and her path has to do with modeling.

Contrast that with a contestant on “America’s Next Top Model”. That show is an occasional guilty pleasure. I love the little challenges they make the girls go through, even though most of them are kind of dumb. Most of the girls on the show are dreamers. Most of them are on very different paths in life other than modeling. Keep in mind that the ones you see on the show are the ones that made it through — there are thousands of other dreamers that didn’t make the cut.

I do recall ONE girl a few years ago on the show that was a career-minded professional, mid-20′s I think, that had no interest in modeling, and her friends dragged her to the tryout for the show, and she ended up either winning or runner-up, I can’t remember exactly. THAT is a different scenario altogether, like a bonus in life, and I remember some of the other girls being pissed off because she won and it wasn’t her dream.

A note on ascending a ladder versus creating your own. The contestants on that and similar reality shows are climbing a ladder created by a specific group of people. Every dreamer that tries out for that show and fails goes home still dreaming. Skater girl, on the other hand, is a dreamer with an important addition: Action. She has her professional shots, she has her portfolio, she makes the contacts she needs to make, and whatever else goes on in that world (I really have no idea what’s involved). But, the difference is, she’s doing something about achieving her dream, not just dreaming about her dream.

When I was a kid, I had a few different things that I thought were my dreams. The most predominant was that I wanted to be an astronaut, and I didn’t grow out of that as I went through high school. I joined the Navy, eventually entered an officer program, passed the written aviation screening exam, and was all ready to make the transition from Navy nuke to Navy aviator, and that’s pretty much as far as it went. Back to the enlisted ranks I went, and it wasn’t until a few years later, as I was getting out of the Navy, that I came back around to it and started taking private flight lessons and bought an airplane. That airplane did a lot more sitting than flying during the couple years I owned it. I have made starts and stops in the aviation world ever since, even to this day as I occasionally pick up the book to study for a glider rating.

So, did I really want to be an astronaut? Did I really want to be a marine biologist? Did I want to be a career military officer? It is an extremely long story about how I came to the realization of what my real dream is, but there are two points on it I want to get out:

1. Defining your true dream in life is a process, not an event.
2. Even once you think you have it defined, your dreams in life can change, just like everything else.

It turns out for myself that my dream has absolutely nothing to do with being anything or achieving anything. It turns out that my dream in life has more to do with being part of something tangible, and in doing a bunch of cool things I just sort of feel like doing. More than anything, my dream is a lifestyle, one that is filled with near constant change in my surroundings and experiences. I don’t really want to be an astronaut — I just want to work in space for a few months. Even if I never achieve that, I’d probably be just as happy paying the $250k for a ride on Virgin Galactic’s suborbital tourist shots.

Sometimes I get depressed and feel like I haven’t achieved anything in my life. But when I really examine it, I’ve done a LOT of cool stuff in my life that most people only dream about (there’s that word again!). I’ve jumped out of perfectly good airplanes (10 times), lost 40 pounds (and still going!), been a race car driver (SCCA Solo II in a 1988 Pontiac Fiero GT), done all the ice sports (curling, hockey, speed skating, figure skating) just to be able to say I did, climbed 14ers, served my country, been a competitive shooter, hit a 1500 yard shot, dated a model, been a competitive swing dancer, driven a HMMWV (a real one), been through a hurricane, been on the open ocean, worked on nuclear power plants, been to graduate school, trained at the Olympic Training Center, rubbed elbows with Olympians, and a boat load more. I change hobbies often, and even with my current 2 year dedication to figure skating, my interests have gone from singles freestyle to ice dance to synchronized (team) skating, and I will not stop until I have competed internationally as an ice dancer (there is an annual adult-only event in Germany that serves as a de facto “adult worlds” of sorts).

From this, it should be obvious that my dream in life is to accumulate experiences, including bad ones (like being in a drive-by shooting, crashing a motorcycle, and a few I can’t mention here). I like being able to walk away and say, “Whoo! That was AWESOME!” Actually, I guess that’s my dream in life: Accumulating a lifetime of awesome moments.

What about you? What is your dream? Can you define it in one sentence? Have you mapped out an action plan for achieving your dream?

Whether your dream is to retire as young as possible and travel the USA in an RV, or analyze soil samples on the surface of Mars, there *is* a path for achieving your dream. But nobody is going to get you there except you, and nobody is going to give you a roadmap. Particularly in this culture in which we live, in which mediocrity is accepted as the norm, the achievers that can step up and run (or even plod) towards their dreams are fairly likely to achieve them, given enough motivation and action.

So, find your dream, then get off your ass and do it!

Until next time,

Jassen Bowman