Failure is always possible. But we can’t let it keep us from discovering our greatest dreams.
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Sometimes, our dreams and desires are the only things that keep us trudging through our lives day after day. Once we’ve spent enough time thinking about these dreams and desires, we usually say to ourselves “that will be the great thing I devote myself to…some day.”
It doesn’t matter what we’re daydreaming about, what’s important is that we have something inside of us that occupies our ‘some day’ space.
Maybe it’s starting our own business. Maybe it’s running a marathon. Maybe it’s traveling somewhere amazing. Maybe it’s helping others in some altruistic way. Maybe it’s writing a book. Whatever it is that occupies our ‘some day’ space, we all have dreams and desires that we keep just out of reach and have yet to act on.
Here we sit, living out our lives clinging to dreams we’ve chosen to keep tucked away without taking the slightest action to get started.
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It would seem that since our dreams and desires are so important to us, the slightest nudge in the right direction would be all we need to get started.
And yet, here we sit, living out our lives clinging to dreams we’ve chosen to keep tucked away without taking the slightest action to get started. But maybe that’s because we know as soon as our dream begins to exist anywhere besides our own mind it ceases to be perfect.
We shift our thinking from how fun and rewarding our dream would be and we start focusing on how much work it will take to achieve that dream.
Our dream is transformed from something that existed exactly how we wanted, to something that is suddenly constrained by reality.
Our dream is no longer an escape from a bad day or a way to pass the time when we’re bored. It’s suddenly something that requires work, planning, and sacrifice. We’ve removed the wondrous possibility of ‘what if’ and replaced it with an action plan, a to-do list, and deadlines.
The beauty of our dreams existing in this space is that since we haven’t started to realize them, they’re still possible and have unlimited potential. Until it’s too late.
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Once our dream starts to become real, it is no longer ours alone. As much as our dream may be moving closer to becoming a reality, it is also moving closer to criticism and the possibility of failure.
Once we start working toward our dream, it’s no longer an escape. It’s no longer something we’ll be able to conjure up for our own enjoyment. It’s now in the process of becoming a reality and there’s always a chance that it doesn’t manifest itself just as we had hoped.
And perhaps this is why we haven’t started and why so many of our dreams are still just ideas that exist only in our mind. The beauty of our dreams existing in this space is that since we haven’t started to realize them, they’re still possible and have unlimited potential.
Until they don’t. Until it’s too late. Until we’ve been so hesitant to get started and spent so much time enjoying the perfection of what could be, that we wake up one day only to realize we missed our window altogether. We were so afraid that our dream might not be exactly as we had imagined that it didn’t have a chance to be at all.
No matter what our dream is, we know deep down that we might fail. And that must be ok.
Because the only thing worse than failure is not giving ourselves a chance to discover what could be.
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Originally posted on bknation.org. Reprinted with permission.Photo: umut33/Pixabay