Don't Follow Dreams, chase them!

I wonder how many of people really are living The Dream, as a posed to A Dream. I’m not talking about relationships, marriage or kids. I am talking about work and lifestyle.

The difference between The Dream and A Dream is that The Dream is about doing what you want, when you want and how you want.

When it comes to work, are you paid the minimum your employer can get away with, or are you being paid what you are worth? Are you even doing a job that interests you? Excites you enough to make you jump out of bed every morning? Or is it just a job, because society tells you that when you leave school you must get a job, pay the bills and taxes?

You see when you work for someone else and they pay you a salary, there’s this danger that we fall into a survival mode, because it becomes easy money. When you come home you don’t have to think, you just chill and enjoy your family and friends time and the money is there for exotic holidays.

Sometimes I see people and wonder what their childhood dreams were, I wonder if they are still working on them or what it is that stopped them from achieving them. Did you follow your childhood dream?

Some people say it’s too difficult to start a business in this day in age, but I say at this end of a pandemic it’s probably the best time to start. Some even think that now they have children, married and settled that’s it’s too late in life to chase dreams, or they are just too old.

Yet Alan Rickman was 69 when he left his mark on Harry Potter. The film actor Samuel L Jackson started his movie career aged 46. The car brand Ford became a household name when it’s creator Henry Ford released the Model T Ford in 1908 aged 45.

So, age has nothing to do with achieving dreams, if you have a vision for the world, or you see a solution to a problem, then make it a priority and the time you need will come, because for you to achieve these things is your gift to the world.

The life you create for you should be about how much free time you want, what you want to spend money on, who you want to spend time with and what you want to do for fun. These are things people never seem ask us, especially in a job interview, yet in their own way they are significant questions.

So, to create the life we want, and begin to live our dream we need to decide what it is we want to get out of life. Many ask, ‘what’s the point in life?’ when actually I think the better question should be ‘what do I want to get out of life?’

Do you want to stay in that boring, monotonous job until you retire? With its salary that just covers the bills each month, its limited vacation time, horrible work life balance that doesn’t really make you jump out of bed each morning. Or do you want to be doing something you enjoy, that will pay you what you’re worth? With its freedom of how much work you take on and how much time you have off.

Do you really want to be living in that terraced house that was built in the 1930s for factory workers, or do you want to build your dream home? Do you want your children to have the standard state education, and then follow you into a boring unskilled job or do you want them to follow their own dreams and achieve great things?

Think about the things you don’t want in life, being told what to do, dealing with stupid people, unsociable work hours, limited or no personal growth.

Then start to focus on experiences you’ve had in life, what is it you are good at? Can you make money from it? Because if you can, every day becomes a play day. As these thoughts begin to take over, you’ll begin to envisage the life you want, in a way that makes you feel it is already the norm.

As I said in the article on change, your vision will give you small changes which change everything. These will lead to another change and another. You begin to do things that make you truly happy, and you begin to repeat those over again and the experiences grow each time.

You become goal oriented, you find yourself saying things like, ‘By the end of the month I want to be spending an hour a day doing this fun thing’ and ‘By this time next year I want to earn enough money doing what I enjoy, so I can leave my boring 40 hour a week job’. And so your ideal week begins to take shape.

Look for people to be jealous of, envy is great motivator. Maybe they work less hours than you but are paid more then you, maybe it’s the size of their audience that makes you jealous because they have only been doing what they do for a short time.

But don’t worry about what others think, other people cannot see the vision you see. They don’t have the skills you have; they can’t see the solutions you see. When you release yourself from the opinion of others, you release yourself from fear. And when you release yourself from fear it becomes easier to communicate your thoughts and wishes to those around you and as you begin to tell other of your dream, they will encourage you to take the action you need to put yourself on the road to fulfil your potential dreams.