Five Reasons Men Don’t Chase Their Dreams

This isn’t just about being miserable in your job, there are many people who are living their dream and doing what they love.

—

Over the past few years, I have read hundreds of articles and scanned several books about chasing your dreams or living your passions. Most of them say pretty much the same thing, you don’t do it out of fear or lack of confidence, and I agree with that to a large degree. 

What I have been thinking about though is where does the fear, lack of confidence and overall inaction come from? Fear can be a driving force for change, but, in this case, it’s a cause of paralysis or at the least hesitation. In my life it certainly has been, I didn’t submit my first article to an actual publication until I was almost forty years old! I didn’t think what I wrote was good enough, and I didn’t have confidence that it could lead to anything worthwhile anyway.

When I did finally submit my writing to public scrutiny, it was accepted, and people seemed to like it. Then I submitted another and then another. Before I knew it, I had several articles published that were being viewed, shared and commented on by thousands of people. With a potential for literally millions to see them! Then I had to sit back and say, “what the hell took you so long?”

There were a multitude of reasons in my life that prevented me from actually pursuing my dream to write for the masses. The reasons listed before, of course, were all base reasons, but what was preventing me from going forward? This is a question that everyone has to ask themselves because it’s rarely the same answer. Here are the reasons I’ve come up with so far that keep us from chasing our dreams.

♦◊♦

Society – Misery loves company, and, unfortunately, failures like others to fail. Too many people today would rather flop around in their displeasure and lack of ambition than do anything about it. So when they see anyone else trying to do better, they find ways, subconsciously or otherwise, to derail the progress. With social media, we see all to often the people in the world that live for the downfall of anyone who has made progress in their lives. So many of us simply decide it’s safest not to attempt anything better because we don’t want to face the trolls.

Comfort – You have a car, a home, nice family, secure job, and food on the table, why on earth would you want to risk any of that? If you take a chance, and it doesn’t work out, what will you do then and how will you be able to protect your comfort zone? Men are naturally creatures of habit, we like to be able to watch the game on Sunday, we like our bowling night, and we don’t want anything to interfere with that. Taking risks makes you break your habits, and for many of us who wait, we just aren’t ready to do that.

Ignorance – We grew up in a society that says a man should finish high school and either go get a college education or learn a trade then start and raise a family, buy a home, and hopefully retire a few years before you die. That’s the “responsible” thing to do, and it’s what our fathers did and what their fathers did before them. Most men don’t even think about what it is they want to do, or, at least, it’s something they thought about when they were young and decided it was a dream of a child and left it somewhere on the side of the road. So now they don’t even realize they still have a dream somewhere in the deep recesses of their hearts, and they certainly don’t realize that those dreams are still possible.

Success – That’s right, success can keep you from your dreams. For many, the job you took to start earning a living progressed somewhere into a career, a good one. Now you’ve moved through the ranks of a job that requires no heart and soul; you’re making a great living and don’t want for anything. Yet, you’re miserable; you feel dead inside every time you walk into your office or sit down at your cubicle. 

You have poured years into a profession that you never considered when you were ten, and now all you want to do is jump out the window. The realization hits you every day that money isn’t everything, and you have wasted years of your life and years of your children’s lives doing something that at the end of the day doesn’t make a difference and certainly doesn’t make you happy.

You’re not tired of your own crap – You wake up every morning, kiss your wife goodbye and head off. You fight traffic and spill coffee in your lap. You talk to customers or coworkers all day whom you don’t really like but have to pretend you do. You get home and lie to your wife and tell her your day was “fine.” Day after day you keep telling yourself that its the best you can do, that there is nothing better for you, that you’re good at what you do, and you enjoy it. Some days you find yourself believing all of your rhetoric, all of the lies you are telling yourself. Until we are ready to face reality, and the fact that we are slowly killing ourselves on the inside there will be no motivation to change!

♦◊♦

This isn’t just about being miserable in your job; there are many people who are living their dream and doing what they love. However, just having a job you love doesn’t mean it’s your dream. I am not saying quit your job and start over today; that’s insane. There has to be a plan, and there has to be a strong, dedicated desire, without both, you will fail. I am still in the building stages of my dream, and I am not sure how far I will go or how long it will take. What I do know is–it’s all up to me.

—

Photo: Flickr/ Roy