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This New Year I’d like to offer a gift to men, the dream biography.
Why?
A dream biography provides us with a means to reimagine our lives, and the future of men in a way that is both inspiring and mindful. I want to give men the means to dream—and dream big—without the constraints of societal expectations.
And so, I write to you this holiday season to explain how to write your dream biography, which invariably will become the story that others will tell about us in the 22nd century. A period that will, hopefully, be known as a profound moment in history when men questioned their identity and interests as men to become better men than before. It’ll be known as a time when men began to dream again.
If you’re like me, you may be feeling eager to just get on with writing a dream biography. So, if you have an interest in writing your secret dream biography now, you can get started by going to DreamBiography.com. The website is a non-profit 501c3 art and social science project created by the Futurity Foundation.
Dream Biography’s mission is to inspire and to be inspired, by providing people with the space to write, and to share their secret dream biographies. You can create any life you can imagine. Here are the instructions that you will read once on the site:
“Begin by imagining that you are 100 years old looking back on your life. What happened between this moment and the age of 100? You can write up to 750 words. This assignment intentionally has no further instructions.”
When I first learned about The Good Men Project, I was delighted to receive such a gift; a space that had been created for conversation and questioning of who we are as men.
I was excited to read so many writers that were contributing, poking, churning, and stirring the pot of manhood in an attempt to get to know, and to redefine our role as men in the world of the 21st century, as well as in our homes, communities, cities, states, and nations. Today, I encourage all of us to stir the pot within our souls and begin redefining ourselves as men in our own unique way.
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The answer to who we are as men invariably lay within. And, as each of us begins reimagining our future, we begin the arduous task of reconstructing our identities and interests as men, who we are now, and in the future.
As men, we may be husbands, soldiers, lovers, caregivers, spiritual warriors, artists, scientists, guardians, fathers, outdoorsmen, creators or a little bit of all of the above. Or, we may be something we have never known ourselves to be.
Writing a dream biography is designed to help us be more honest about who we are, what we want to become, and what our intentions are for our lives, apart from the roles assigned to us by society, or those roles we’ve taken on willingly.
For this New Year, I’d like to encourage everyone reading to do something other than make New Year’s resolutions. I encourage all of us to be bold, explore, and to take the path less traveled, a potentially life-changing path.
Write a secret dream biography.
In order to write one, we’re going to have to dig deep into the bowels of our soul to feel, and to begin thinking about what we want for ourselves, in our life, and no one else’s.
For a moment, our aim is to forget what our parents, teachers, spouse, children, elders, or anyone else in the world expected, or expects us to do now, or in our lifetime.
We’re free—free to imagine the secret life we’ve always wanted to live so that one day, it’s no longer a secret, but our reality.
As men, we can begin reimagining our long-term vision for our lives by going to DreamBiography.com where we can write our secret dream biography. We can literally re-imagine the rest our lives, and then post it anonymously.
The best part of writing a dream biography is that anyone can write one and they can do it anonymously, so we’re safe to explore our biggest and boldest dreams without fear of shame or failure.
We do not need to be strong men, big men, or stoic men to write one. And, we definitely don’t need to be whatever anyone else thinks we should be as men.
All we need to start writing our secret dream biography is a willingness to imagine our future, a desire to create the life we have not yet lived, and the tenacity to write the most ideal version of our life as if it has already occurred.
The most interesting part of DreamBiography.com, launched at the end of 2017, is that users can also read the secret dream biographies of other people who have written one and shared it publicly, but anonymously. Users can also write a secret dream biography and keep it private if they’re not ready to share it.
Writing a secret dream biography is powerful, I can assure you. It’s even more powerful when you share it publicly—even when it’s anonymous.
I wrote my first dream biography 18 years ago while completing my Master’s degree at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. I wrote my second one when I started working toward my Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in England in 2004. Nearly 70 percent of what I imagined has now been realized. I can assure you that I didn’t include nearly dying of cancer when I wrote my first two, so don’t worry about getting it right. Fortunately, I’m still here and I’ll be writing a new one this New Year’s Eve, with each of you, hopefully.
“When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” ~ Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
Dreams do come true when we make our intentions known. This exercise is so powerful that I have required students I’ve taught at various universities to write one before they come to the second class at the beginning of each semester.
I have also used this exercise with clients whom I advise and mentor, requiring them to write one before we begin working together. I don’t want clients to waste their money if their future doesn’t even include what they’re hiring me to advise them to do.
Regardless of where I have written or taught, or the quality of the students or clients, this exercise has always been beneficial for anyone who takes the time to do it. Now, let’s get to the essential elements of a dream biography.
What is a dream biography?
A biography is an account of a person’s life story, a memoir for example. As with any story, a biography includes specific acts and scenes that are more memorable than others. Biographies don’t include the trivial moments of each day, week, month, or year. A good biography includes the highlights of the most salient moments in a person’s life, along with intimate details of their personal experiences with other people, or in relation to specific events.
A dream biography is different from a biography, and is extraordinarily empowering. It is different from a biography in that we have not yet fully lived our life. It is a “dream” because we must imagine the life we would like to live before we live it.
If you’re currently 18 years old, or 88 years old, imagine what you’d like to see happen between now and the age of 100. A dream biography does not focus on the past; the past is irrelevant. The past no longer exists. A dream biography is about now, and about the future, your future, and our collective future.
Why should we write a secret dream biography?
When we write our intentions, it triggers the part of the brain that relates to ownership. In psychology, the idea of ownership is called the endowment effect. When we clearly envision our life before it has even been lived, we are taking ownership of our future. What we envision for our life actually begins to be integrated as a part of our identity; who we believe we are as a person, as men.
When we write and share our dream biography with others, the endowment effect is even stronger. The life we’ve imagined becomes more real because we have a psychological preference to be accountable to who we believe we are in life.
The endowment effect is so powerful that it can even lead us to maintain a mask or a facade, leading us to psychologically cling to a decision we’ve made in order to uphold appearances, usually because we fear failing ourselves, or others in our lives. Most of us have no desire to be fake, or to uphold facades that mask who we really are, even when we do so. That’s how powerful the endowment effect is in our lives.
The endowment effect is also one of the reasons we minimize the risks that we take in life; we don’t want to fail ourselves once we’ve taken ownership of the choices we’ve already made. It also keeps us from quitting long after we should have quit. Dr. Adam Grant, a social scientist at Princeton University, discovered that successful people quit more often and try new things more quickly. He wrote about it in his book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World. In sum, quitters do win, and they win more often than those who are afraid to quit, or too fearful to try something new after they quit something.
Writing a secret dream biography is one way to use the endowment effect in a positive way. A secret dream biography allows us to state our intentions for our life so that we take ownership of our life, but it doesn’t put us on the hook with anyone in our life because it’s written anonymously. No one needs to know our secret aspirations, except us. It’s a beautiful psychological trick with positive benefits.
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Taking ownership of our decisions, and the effects of the choices that we make, empowers us. It also makes it more likely that we’ll stay aligned with the truth we’ve envisioned for ourselves. And, when we publicly share our intentions, even if anonymously, it makes it even more real to ourselves, and to the universe. There’s a bonus too: writing and stating our intentions for our lives makes it easier for us to set clear goals, particularly when our goals are aligned with what we’ve envisioned for our life.
This is useful to know if we’re making New Year’s resolutions too—these are goals, as well. And, if we want to enhance the likelihood of succeeding, writing our secret dream biography will increase our chances of following through with our resolutions. Research shows that setting goals in alignment with our intentions, the life we envision, leads us to “demonstrate greater persistence, creativity, and risk-taking” as we work toward living the life of our dreams.
So, go for it, write now! Share your dreams with the universe and encourage others to do the same. Be bold.
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” ~ Mark Twain
And, before I conclude, one cool thing about posting your secret dream biography on the Dream Biography website is that you’ll receive what you wrote as a time capsule letter one year from the date of submission so that you can revisit what you’ve imagined for your life, and then reimagine it. Go for it, and be original.
The more each of us as men get in sync with our inner truth, the more likely we’ll be able to realize our collective aspirations as men, and the truth of who we are as men, as humans. Explore and dream, and dream big, so that you can discover the life that you truly want to live.
Happy New Year!
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This post was originally published on elephantjournal.com, and is republished here with the author’s permission.
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Photo credit: Getty Images