The Building Of A Dream

All of us have dreams. They can appear in the day as we're zoning out and daydreaming, or they can appear in the night as we sleep. Some dreams are pleasant and leave us with warm fuzzy feelings when we wake up in the morning, while others are downright unpleasant nightmares.

Dreams are usually fragments of our imagination, and we choose not to act on them most of the time.

But imagine the consequences if Martin Luther King Jr never did act on his dream of seeing racial equality come to fruition.

Imagine if he kept this statement within him and that he never spoke it out:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Would there have been any progress made in challenging the biases of racial discrimination at all?

Not so likely.

Tony Gaskins also highlights the importance of a dream in his book The Dream Chaser:

If You Don't Build Your Dream, Someone Will Hire You to Help Build Theirs.

In this day and age, we have multiple first world problems.

We have this idea of a dream vacation, a dream home, a dream car, and many other dreams.

But yet we try to work our way towards those dreams by building someone else's dreams, and when a financial recession hits, the building of someone else's dreams takes a hit, and we may get laid off consequently.

With these layoffs, it isn't easy to get back on track. We'd scramble to look for limited work openings that everyone else is competing for, which, as Robert Kiyosaki says:

The richest people in the world look for and build networks; everyone else looks for work.

It's not that easy to build our way to our own dreams when we're restricting ourselves by the constraints of building someone else's dreams, because we would be at the mercy of the rules that someone else has set for us.

For example, I may have busted my butt securing various contracts and helped my employer to profit immensely... but the boss doesn't think that I deserve a raise or a promotion.

For example, I may have managed to enforce and implement new cost-saving techniques for the organisation... but a higher level manager gets the credit and the bonus.

There is much unfairness in such situations.

The best way to get out of this situation would be to develop a side hustle and work for oneself.

The problem, however, is awareness.

If people don't know that I have something to market, they aren't going to engage in any business transactions with me at all.

The shadiest drug dealers can earn big loads of dirty money because they have precisely that network to refer new clients to them consistently.

The challenge, of course, is to build and enlarge one's network, as Robert Kiyosaki has mentioned.

Building awareness

Building awareness doesn't come that instantaneously.

Every social media influencer wannabe with hundreds of thousands of followers always had to start from zero. They'd need to have appealing content for people to follow them and maintain their follower base.

But those who can build their follower base to a sizable count can be approached by companies and paid to create posts that market those products.

Those who can build their follower base can market their own products and get paid for it.

The thing is, it always requires a big audience for the effects to scale nicely such that one can earn enough to build their dream.

A Vocal article, for instance, pays the author based on how many reads their articles get. A restaurant's profitability, for instance, is dependent on the amount of foot traffic patronising their premises and paying for the food that they order.

If I could attract 1 million customers who pay me $1 each for a cheap product, I'd be earning a million dollars right there.

But if I were working a standard 9-5 job, there's no way I'd be able to make a million dollars just by being a salaried employee (unless I'm one of the top tier executives, perhaps).

And therein lies the conundrum in trying to create that network.

Building a network takes time, while finding work as a salaried employee is easier than building a network that leads to outsized profits. But the differences in potential returns are larger, though the opportunity cost of entrepreneurship is that the business idea could very well fail.

Therefore, it's worthwhile to start small

Have a dream to operate your own business and catapult your way into financial freedom?

Start small. Know and understand the trends for where the money is flowing. Build up a network. Re-imagine and re-invent. Always keep learning. Most of all, be consistent in your efforts.

That's what I'm still learning as I build on towards my dream in the hope of being able to have the free time to fuss over my future children and be able to send them to school personally.

That's what I'm still learning as I build on towards my dream of being able to enjoy the different sights and sounds around me while everyone else is cooped up in their offices on normal working weekdays.

That's what I'm still learning as I build on towards my dream of being able to treat work as a hobby.

After all, the standard "dream" of going to a good university, getting good grades, finding a good job, getting a good house and retiring with a good life has all but crumbled in modern first world societies, hasn't it?

Joel Yong, PhD, is a biochemical engineer/scientist, an educator and a writer. He has authored 1 ebook (which is available on Amazon.com in Kindle format) and co-authored 6 journal articles in internationally peer-reviewed scientific journals. His main focus is on finding out the fundamentals of biochemical mechanisms in the body that the doctors don’t educate the lay people about, and will then proceed to deconstruct them for your understanding — as an educator should. Do visit his website here or his Patreon to connect.