Dream but Do.

“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.” – British Army Colonel T. E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom:

Dreaming is cheap; almost everyone dreams, but executing the dream is often expensive. Your dreams will only be wishes until you start doing something about it on a daily basis. You don’t have to be great to start, but you must start to be great. We all have greatness in us and have potential energy inherent in us, but we need kinetic energy to bring forth our potential. For most of us, our potential energy gets unused as a result of childhood programming, societal indoctrination, religious dogma and familiar naysayers that disrupt our kinetic energy. There is a price to be paid to achieve your dreams, which involves betting on yourself, showing up daily, having faith and executing relentlessly. Dreams are free, but executing them is expensive. Your dreams are valid, but you must do whatever is necessary to achieve them.

Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Don’t wait for the perfect timing; just do your best every day, and you will get closer to achieving your goals with time. Don’t ask for permission; ask for forgiveness. So, if you want to be a writer? Just write your own way. Get out the crappy part of your writing daily, and with time, you will get great at it. You don’t need an agent to write; just write, find your voice and style, and, eventually, you will attract your tribe and get your book published if that is your goal. As Wooden Allen famously said, “80% of success is showing up”. You must show up by working on your craft, getting so good that you cannot be ignored.

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” Begin it now. – William Hutchison Murray

In her 2014 Dartmouth’s Commencement Speech, creator, writer, and producer of the ABC hits Scandal, Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice and How to Get Away with Murder, Shonda Rhimes advised “Ditch the dream and be a doer”.

When people give these kinds of speeches, they usually tell you all kinds of wise and heartfelt things. They have wisdom to impart. They have lessons to share. They tell you: Follow your dreams. Listen to your spirit. Change the world. Make your mark. Find your inner voice and make it sing. Embrace failure. Dream. Dream and dream big. As a matter of fact, dream and don’t stop dreaming until all of your dreams come true.

I think that’s crap.

I think a lot of people dream. And while they are busy dreaming, the really happy people, the really successful people, the really interesting, engaged, powerful people, are busy doing.

The dreamers. They stare at the sky and they make plans and they hope and they talk about it endlessly. And they

I think a lot of people dream. And while they are busy dreaming, the really happy people, the really successful people, the really interesting, engaged, powerful people, are busy doing.

The dreamers. They stare at the sky and they make plans and they hope and they talk about it endlessly. And they start a lot of sentences with “I want to be …” or “I wish.”

“I want to be a writer.” “I wish I could travel around the world.”

And they dream of it. The buttoned-up ones meet for cocktails and they brag about their dreams, and the hippie ones have vision boards and they meditate about their dreams. Maybe you write in journals about your dreams or discuss it endlessly with your best friend or your girlfriend or your mother. And it feels really good. You’re talking about it, and you’re planning it. Kind of. You are blue-skying your life. And that is what everyone says you should be doing. Right? I mean, that’s what Oprah and Bill Gates did to get successful, right?

No.

Dreams are lovely. But they are just dreams. Fleeting, ephemeral, pretty. But dreams do not come true just because you dream them. It’s hard work that makes things happen. It’s hard work that creates change.

So, Lesson One, I guess is: Ditch the dream and be a doer, not a dreamer. Maybe you know exactly what it is you dream of being, or maybe you’re paralyzed because you have no idea what your passion is. The truth is, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to know. You just have to keep moving forward. You just have to keep doing something, seizing the next opportunity, staying open to trying something new. It doesn’t have to fit your vision of the perfect job or the perfect life. Perfect is boring and dreams are not real. Just … do. So you think, “I wish I could travel.” Great. Sell your crappy car, buy a ticket to Bangkok, and go. Right now. I’m serious.

You want to be a writer? A writer is someone who writes every day, so start writing. You don’t have a job? Get one. Any job. Don’t sit at home waiting for the magical opportunity. Who are you? Prince William? No. Get a job. Go to work. Do something until you can do something else.

A writer is someone who writes every day, so start writing.

I did not dream of being a TV writer. Never, not once when I was here in the hallowed halls of the Ivy League, did I say to myself, “Self, I want to write TV.”

You know what I wanted to be? I wanted to be Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison. That was my dream. I blue sky’ed it like crazy. I dreamed and dreamed. And while I was dreaming, I was living in my sister’s basement. Dreamers often end up living in the basements of relatives, FYI. Anyway, there I was in that basement, and I was dreaming of being Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison. And guess what? I couldn’t be Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, because Toni Morrison already had that job and she wasn’t interested in giving it up. So one day I was sitting in that basement and I read an article that said—it was in The New York Times—and it said it was harder to get into USC Film School than it was to get into Harvard Law School. And I thought I could dream about being Toni Morrison, or I could do.

At film school, I discovered an entirely new way of telling stories. A way that suited me. A way that brought me joy. A way that flipped this switch in my brain and changed the way I saw the world. Years later, I had dinner with Toni Morrison. All she wanted to talk about was Grey’s Anatomy. That never would have happened if I hadn’t stopped dreaming of becoming her and gotten busy becoming myself.

One More Dream

You must marry actions to your thoughts if you want to reach your goals. Your thoughts are the starting point of your dreams, and you owe it to yourself to aim high with your dreams. The sad part is many people never get beyond dreaming. Their dreams end in their thoughts. That unrealized potential to do something great and be happy can be maddening. Dreams are the essence of impossibility thinking. You must be able to dream to plant the seeds of what you think you can do in life. It’s when you combine that impossibility thinking with intentional actions aimed squarely at achieving your dreams that you become a possibility achiever.

“The man who does more than he is paid for will soon be paid for more than he does.” – Napoleon Hill

In his book Strength to Love, The reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. observed

One of the great tragedies of life is that men seldom bridge the gulf between practice and profession, between doing and saying. A persistent schizophrenia leaves so many of us tragically divided against ourselves. On the one hand, we proudly profess certain sublime and noble principles, but on the other hand, we sadly practice the very antithesis of these principles. How often are our lives characterised by a high blood pressure of creeds and an anaemia of deeds!

We talk eloquently about our commitment to the principles of Christianity, and yet our lives are saturated with the practices of paganism. We proclaim our devotion to democracy, but we sadly practice the very opposite of the democratic creed. We talk passionately about peace, and at the same time we assiduously prepare for war. We make our fervent pleas for the high road of justice, and then we tread unflinchingly the low road of injustice.

This strange dichotomy, this agonising gulf between the ought and the is, represents the tragic theme of man’s earthly pilgrimage.

Meditations

Daily Calm with Tamara Levitt -Unbroken

Many of us carry a sense that we aren’t whole unless we are perfect. So we always have to fix ourselves in some ways. What many of us don’t realize is that so long as we view ourselves as needing to be fixed, the message we are actually sending to ourselves is how we are broken. But there is something, if you could just get over, be more or less of it would fix you. Perhaps you are addicted to healing yourself, holding the idea that if you are fully healed, sooner or later you will be complete. We are good enough as we are.

Acceptance is the key to letting go of the idea that we must always fix ourselves. To accept is to understand ourselves and get curious in a friendly way about the why behind our actions. This is the place to which change occurs, not criticism. Be gentle with yourself; you are not broken or need to be fixed. You are whole; you are complete precisely as you are.