I’ve seen several examples of this in my own small circle. It seems that people have an “all or nothing” approach to their dream. I think achieving even a small part of your dream is still a success. It’s not selling out or giving up, it’s just accepting reality.
As a kid, I dreamed of being an fighter (and airline) pilot. As time passed and my vision worsened, I reached a point I couldn’t join the Air Force at all, much less get near a plane. So I concentrated on another, cubicle-based career that enabled me to have RK surgery, get a waiver for my medical and learn to fly a small plane. I’m not viewing the world from a 747 cockpit, but looking out a Cessna’s window ain’t too bad.
Ten years ago, my dream was to retire early, move onto a big boat, and sail the world. At the time, a co-worker and friend had the same dream and we shared many articles and books while we planned. As time passed, the reality of money, family responsibility and my own medical limitations made the dream unreachable. So, I have a small cruiser on an inland lake that I spend weekends on. I’m never going to sail to Tahiti, but I have a part of my dream, and can sit on a decent beach and enjoy the sand in my toes. My friend refused to scale back at all, and has none of it.
I don’t think I failed at my dreams, I simply adjusted them to enjoy what I could.
It’s a question people have to ask themselves. Do people react to you as if you are some kind of supermodel? Maybe there is a shot at modeling. Did your weird obsession with the piano at age 4 lead to a situation at 14 where people treat you like an adult when you perform? Maybe there is a shot at music performance.
The person who is jealous of all the attention the pretty person gets, or the high-school graduate who can only play Iron Man and Smoke on the Water should start making other plans.
I think there is shame in the background. Didn’t get to do something spectacular? That’s because you suck!! But actually, if you realize that a nice home and some hot dates are the main thing (or whatever achievable, stable situation), it can be done without getting ridiculously fancy. Srsly, do you want to go through life with the Spandex and hair-care issues of your average famous rock guitarist?
There’s a huge difference between ‘following your dream’:
when you have the ability to achieve it and have a back-up plan and start trying in your spare time and earn some money in the meantime
by risking everything (simply assuming everything will work)
If you expect to win millions in a Vegas Casino, you will be very disappointed.
If you have little or no talent (e.g. acting / singing), then putting all your efforts into that will fail. (Mind you, these fields are so crowded that even a lot of talent may not be enough.)
In my case I always wanted to play / teach / organise chess full-time. But only world-class players get rich doing that.
So I got a regular job and studied chess in my spare time.
After a while I got lucky and was offered one of the few full-time chess jobs in the country.
I followed my dream, and now I have my dream job. But it’s a realistic dream job, not an unrealistic one. Dreams do not have to be unrealistic.
If you want to help the poor, but you want to get really rich doing it, you’re probably going to have to choose one or the other as your target. These are not outcomes that tend to go together.
But if you want to help the poor, and you want to be respected doing it, those outcomes are way easier to reach at the same time.
There are endless combinations of potential dream attributes. Some of them are likely to work together well “I want to be rich AND famous!” and some are not “I want to be rich AND spend all day every day reading Gor novels!”
In most things, riskier things have a greater range of potential outcomes. That’s why they are riskier. If you want to be safer, take fewer risks. If safety doesn’t fulfill you, take more risks, but require the risks to be within the realm of possibility.
As a small business consultant, I see too often the damage followed by people when they decide to “follow your dreams” (FYD) … then when things go wrong they’ll “hope and pray”, and of course, “work harder”. You especially see this foolishness in the world of franchise owners, and this desire to FYD is one of the driving factors in middle-aged people making bad choices and throwing away $300k-$1m on a 10-year job. So many times I hear
“Well, I always wanted to own a business, so…”
that I don’t even know if I hear it any more.
(Don’t even get me started about franchise brokers. I’m sure there are honest ones out there, but that’s because I believe in statistics. Here’s a pitch I heard made to retired military personnel: “Do what you’re told, just follow the instructions, and you’ll make your franchise a success.” Holy fuckin’ hell!)
Well this touches on some of the unhealthy aspects of some goals, where it’s largely a relative thing, and just about being richer, or looking better, than the next man.
Status is the main thing, whether it’s something of interest to you, or something worthwhile in a broader sense, are secondary considerations.
Here in Shanghai most people’s dreams seem to be like this.
I will say my daughter and her friends have, for years, mocked the messages they receive about “following your dreams” and “if you wish for it, it just may come true!” Such cynicism from ones so young is… refreshing.
IMHO a weakness of the “follow your dream” trope is that we too often categorize “dreams” as success in things like arts or sports or wealth creation, and conversely consider things like success in family or community or standard employment as “settling” or “NOT following your dream”. This is very constraining on the one hand, and dismissive of people who don’t have BIG DREAMS!
For many people, having a steady job that pays for life and a family is dream enough.
I think one should follow one’s dream only if the dream can be turned into a plan of action, where the target(s) and the means can be clearly controlled (i.e. identified, assessed, adjusted and conjugated) so that one can quantify one’s progress. Dreams are ineffable and unquantifiable.
I think the “follow your dreams” advice can be very damaging. There’s a variation out there that’s even worse: “Do what you love, and the money will follow.” Nope, often it doesn’t.
It’s easy enough to retcon “follow your dreams” into something more realistic about keeping your passions alive and not feeling defeated by your limitations. That’s fine. But for most people, “follow your dreams” still means: ignore the naysayers, GO FOR IT, and become a movie star (or President, NFL quarterback, etc.).
When I was young, I had no shortage of teachers telling me that I was destined for great things and should pursue a career in a certain, very limited field. When that didn’t materialize, one of my former teachers chastised me for “not wanting it enough.” That’s the ugly flipside of the “follow your dreams” mantra: if you don’t make it, it’s your own fault being insufficiently committed. It doesn’t matter if you’ve vastly overestimated your own talents or are competing with thousands of people for a handful of jobs—it’s merely because you didn’t “dream big” enough. What utter bilge.
In my case, the problem was exacerbated by well-meaning family members who encouraged me to have a “backup plan.” The backups they suggested were so stupefyingly, depressingly mundane that they hardened my determination to pursue my unrealistic goals. Life doesn’t have to be a choice between fame and working in a cubicle.
The cynic in me suspects that some successful people who lecture the masses, “Follow your dreams (and you can be just like me!)” are doing so partly out of a motive of knowing that the vast majority of them* cannot or will not* succeed like them, and so get a big ego boost out of watching the masses stumble and realize forlornly that they will never rise to the level of Successful Person X, and that Successful Person X is superior. Like someone who masters 7 languages, then tells people, “Anyone can be like me!” Trying to rub salt in wounds.
Rowe started a foundation that’s all about encouraging people to work in essential skilled-labor jobs that actually exist. I think that’s an important counterweight to the idea that everyone needs to go to college and work in the “knowledge economy.” Not everyone can or should do that.
I knew a few theater majors in college, including one (I’ll call her Anne) who was pretty vocal about her plans to become a Hollywood actress and how acting was her true passion and blah blah blah. I thought she was pretty obnoxious, and to be brutally honest I saw her in several school plays and thought she sucked.
Since we weren’t really friends to begin with we haven’t kept in touch, but I did hear that she’d moved to LA and had been in some low-budget horror movies. I just confirmed this via the IMDb. Anne has 12 acting credits listed over the past decade, although none are for anything I’ve heard of and a couple are for TV shows that don’t seem to have ever even aired. She hasn’t even starred in low-budget horror movies, she’s in “Girl #1” type parts that you have to click “See full cast” to find. I saw that she’d also posted her demo reel on her IMDb page, and frankly I can see why she’s never landed a decent role. She’s improved a little since college, but is still a lousy actress.
That said, Anne did in fact manage to get work as an actress and other former classmates who I thought were more talented did not. I don’t think any of the others even really tried, but instead chose to pursue other interests. Those I’ve kept in touch with seem happy enough with their lives. I doubt they envy Anne, and all are doing things I personally would consider more interesting and worthwhile than playing bit parts in cheap movies hardly anyone will ever see. But if Anne meant all that stuff about how important acting was to her (and since she’s stuck it out in Hollywood despite her very limited success then I guess she did) she probably doesn’t envy them either.
I think whether Anne’s career as an actress should serve as an inspiration or a warning to others basically comes down to this:
I think y’all underestimate how persuasive the subtle message of “don’t aim too high” is for a lot of kids. Maybe not for bright, middle class white kids with “good” parents, but that’s not the majority experience in America. Plenty of kids get told every day, explicitly and implicitly, not to aim very high at all.
I teach at a public magnet school, and we specialize in sending working class kids to elite private colleges–not just because a degree from CMC sets you up better than a degree from State U, because it’s cheaper, and because they do better there than at regional state schools. I cannot tell you how often I have “concerned” adults–often on my faculty–wonder if those sorts of schools are “right” for our sorts of kids.
If your dreams are “go to an exclusive college” and you miss, you can pick up and go somewhere else - and if you didn’t miss by much, your grades and profile are probably good enough to get good money at a less elite liberal arts school - staying away from the huge impersonal State colleges.
And a college degree is - for most people - a dream worth pursuing - even if you get it in theatre, its a check box for a lot of jobs.
If your dream is to be a famous musician, that one is tougher. And its easiest to tell this in two stories.
A shirttail relative of mine wanted to be a musician. She dropped out of college, moved to California, and was in one failed band after another until she was fifty. She worked hard at it - hard enough that she never really built up any sort of security towards her old age. She held temp jobs. She lived hand to mouth. She’s now in her sixties and having chased her dream her whole life, has a sort of sucky reality.
A friend of mine is a professional musician. He works his butt off at it. He is in several bands, but he has 35 students that he teaches and he produces albums for other musicians. He has managed to turn his “dream” into a rather prosaic job - and is lucky enough that he still has a passion, even after teaching eight year olds how to play Ironman on guitar over and over and over (which is about the time a lot of people decide that being a business analyst for Acme Corp is a fine day job).
I have a couple of friends who are writers. One spent ten years following his muse - never got anything published, and got sort of bitter - and went into the non-profit sector as an organizer. Another one sold out his muse in year 3 and now makes a pretty good living with a dozen or more books in print. But he writes sometimes on how “following your dream” involves making compromises - like saying ‘I’m going to write what will sell, in a style that will sell.’
Your dreams should be followed, but perhaps you should follow them after you are awake and not sleepwalk. We tell our kids “that’s great, what’s your backup plan.” Or perhaps “aim as high as you want, but if you miss, know where you are landing.”
