Dreams, Meet Reality: A Risk I’m Willing to Take

I’m reading Po Bronson’s What Should I Do With My Life? It’s not a self-help book, but a book of stories of how people have considered and answered this question, and the soul-searching and cliff-jumping and heartbreak and reward that have come along the way.

One of his themes is this idea that we often don’t take out our dreams, brush the dust off them, and put them into action, because we don’t want to damage them. If we keep our dreams locked up somewhere, safe from reality, where they never come out to see the light of day, then we never run the risk of our dreams falling apart before our eyes.

“I didn’t want to dare risk detroying this fantasy by subjecting it to reality,” he writes of one of his own dreams.

I’ve been risking damaging my dreams by actually going after them. In the last three years, I’ve left a job, a community, a partner, grad school, a paycheque, and struck out following my own dream – becoming a coach, facilitator, and writer. The process has been terrifying, risky, and incredibly fulfilling. And the exceptional thing is that now, as a coach, I get to see other people run into those moments where, for one reason or another, ignoring their dreams and keeping their dreams safe is no longer a viable option. They’re ready to step forward, nothing ventured nothing gained, and dare to see what happens.

“It took me seventeen years to take the first step,” one man laments in the book, looking back on all the time before he started to follow his dreams.

When are you going to take your first step? If you already have, when will you take your next? 

Like what you’re reading? There’s more where that came from!
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