Dream

When I was 35, I had a problem.  I accomplished the goals I set out to accomplish when I was a teenager.  My dream was simple.  I wanted a wonderful family, and from a material perspective I only had two things on my list: I wanted a nice house, with a view, and a cottage, with a view.  By 35 I had all three.  So now what?  What was I going to do?  I had realized my dreams which in retrospect were rather small compared to my abilities.

So I was lost for several years.  What do you do when you achieve your dreams?  What do you do when you have decades more of life to live, and yet you were where you’d set out to be?  I lost my drive.  I lost my wanting for more.  I lost what would get me out of bed in the mornings with a jump in my step.  It was hard.  Really, really hard.  It was a crisis for sure, even before mid life.

After flailing around in the dark for a couple of years, blaming everything around me for my discontented state,  I finally learned that if you don’t dream big enough, you might run the risk of achieving your dreams.  That sounds strange to say, risk achieving your dreams, but it’s true.  The reality is if you’ve been striving the whole time, and then finally make it, there’s not joy on the other side, there isn’t enlightenment, there isn’t freedom.

There’s only the next day.

That next day with you staring at you in the mirror saying ‘now what?’  I had dreamed a dream I was fully capable of fulfilling as who I was when I was 18.  I didn’t have to become more, I just had to be me, and I would get there.  I certainly couldn’t see that at the time.  It seemed like a huge goal.  An almost impossible feat.  But I was wrong, and I wasn’t thankful I was there, I was lost.  When I look at it now, I was living the dream of millions of people, and I wasn’t thankful for it.  I didn’t appreciate what I had.

So what I had to learn was two things.  The first is to be grateful for what you have, so that when you have more, you’ll be grateful for that too.  And the second thing was to dream bigger.  Really, really big.  When I finally realized that, I decided to have a new dream, but I wasn’t going to make the same mistake of dreaming too small again.

Let me walk you through the steps.  I thought to myself, ‘I’d like to have more money, and I want to live in Hawaii.’  Those are pretty broad, and could be anything.  If I pick up a dollar in the street, that means I have more money.  So I had to get specific.  As I was getting more specific, I kept in mind I wanted to get bigger.  Then I dreamed even bigger than that.  What would my dream be?  To have a massive amount of money to change the world in some small way.  So how much money do you need to change the world?  A million dollars?  No.  A billion dollars?  Maybe.  A hundred billion dollars?  That should do it.  So that is my dream.  To have a hundred billion dollars.

Now what about Hawai’i?  Do I want to own a run-down shack?  I could buy that today.  So that’s not going to do it.  What about owning a hotel, so I could have some income as well?  That’s currently out of my reach, and bigger for sure, but is that big enough?  Will that keep driving me?  No.  I could get there in a few years if I tried.

Then I learned that Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, bought the island of Lana’i for five hundred million dollars.  Now that sounds better!  I don’t just want a hotel, I want to own the Island of Lana’i.  That is a dream worth having.  That is a dream worth pursuing.  That is something that will keep me going until the end of days.

So now that I have the dream, and it is specific, measurable and achievable (because other people have done it, so why couldn’t I?), what was the next thing to actually making it happen?  It’s one thing to dream, it’s something completely different to making it happen.

I realized in that moment, I had a problem.

The problem wasn’t the obvious, that I didn’t have the money yet.  I realized I was not yet the type of person who would have a hundred billion dollars.  Or own the island of Lana’i.  I couldn’t.  I didn’t know how.  Yet.

That’s when I realized it was not about the money, or the dream, or the Hawaiian island.  That’s what I want to pass on to you.  This realization that the real value of a dream is not the thing itself, or the circumstances, or the pride of ownership, but who you have to become to attract those things into your life.

The bigger you dream, the more you will demand of yourself, and the closer you will become to reaching your potential.  It’s not about what you have, it’s about who you have to become, to have those things.

So dream big.  Really, really big.  Then go get it.