I’m a crappy dreamer. Seriously. I mean I’ve got no problem starting a dream (massage business dream included), but what happens next always gets me in trouble.
And what happens next is this: Inevitably, I hit a bump in the road, and I jump to next dream.
Basically, I’m a dream jumper.
And when I do the deep dive into my history I see that dream jumping is more than a pattern. It’s a habit. A way of life.
The downside to dream jumping is obvious. You don’t stay with a dream long enough to see if you can make that dream come true.
That alone is a big-time incentive to stop dream jumping.
And you’d think that I should have been able to purge dream jumping from my brain years ago.
But it’s not that easy.
I mean there’s got to be an upside to dream jumping or I wouldn’t be hooked on it.
Here’s what I think the upside is: I get an endless supply of hope when I jump to the next dream.
This dream sucks (hope leaving), but this one could be the winner (hope is back:-).
To be honest, I don’t even think you need an endless supply of dreams to have endless hope. You just need 3 or 4 dreams.
Focus on dream #1 and when the going gets tough bounce to dream #2. Rinse and repeat down the line until you’re back to dream #1. And by that time you’ve forgotten that dream #1 wasn’t working out.
Okay, at this point, you’re probably thinking that I’m hating on hope.
I’m not.
In fact, I love me some hope.
We (humans) need hope.
But chasing hope is not the same as chasing a dream.
Chase hope all the time and you’re back to starting a dream but not seeing it through.
Here’s what I mean.
Caught in a Business Dream
Portraits In Words was a business dream that I had 20+ years ago during the analogue to digital transition phase.
At the time I interviewed friends, family members and anyone who I thought had an interesting story. I’d record the interview and over time I had built a library of audio recordings that told stories about many peoples’ lives.
In essence, I had an audio scrapbook of memories.
I loved my ad hoc audio scrapbook!
So, how was I going to turn this idea into a business?
Well, the sales part seemed easy to me.
Your audio scrapbook might have a chapter of you “interviewing” your kid from when he was 1 to 18 (or indefinitely). Another chapter might be various short interviews with your mother or your best friend from high school.
Being able to hear a voice (kid, friend, relative, whomever) as it changed through time, both literally and figuratively, seemed priceless to me. And I thought other people would think the same thing.
I also had an idea about how I’d deliver this product.
I knew I wanted this to be a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) product. The customer would receive a kit. In the kit would be a handheld recorder and a tutorial resource (possibly access to a website) where I’d provide templates showing how to do short but meaningful interviews so that the audio scrapbook didn’t turn into an audio tome that you never, ever wanted to click on.
I was so jacked about this business idea that I had even bought a very expensive ($2000) digital recorder for a side business of interviewer-for-hire.
Hope was off the charts.
And it stayed off the charts until my first road block.
I was trying to fund this business dream through various income streams (massage, personal training and writing), and it was becoming apparent that I needed more money, a loan, an investor, something.
So what did I do next?
I generated another business dream, of course. This time it was a business idea that involved massage and functional exercise training.
When the exercise training idea hit a snafu I added in another business dream, and over the next five years I’d jump from dream to dream every time hope reached a critical low.
At the end of five years, hope remained up, but my Portrait In Words dream remained a dream with no sign of ever becoming a reality.
So where does that leave us with hope?
Here’s where it leaves me.
Dreams start with hope.
But I know that there’ll be some defeats along the way and hope will vanish.
This is when I Zen it.
I don’t chase hope. I watch it leave, then I work hard on my dream—and I see if hope returns.
Guess what?
If I get a small win, it usually does.
Not in some big, dramatic way.
It’s more like: Wow, I brought 5 new clients in this week.
And then I get a zap of hope which usually gives me enough juice to get me to my next win.
But here’s the thing, you may not get a win.
You may suffer defeat after defeat and hope may never come back for that dream.
That’s okay.
Maybe it’s time to let that dream go so that you can work on another one.
In hindsight, maybe Portraits in Words could have been a small business if I stuck with it. But it could have also been a big waste of time and money. Ultimately, the hope went away because I didn’t think it was good bet.
So here’s how I handle hope when I dream now.
- Dream.
- Embrace hope.
- Work on the dream.
- Watch hope go.
- Reassess the dream.
- If I decide it’s worth pursuing, I work hard on the dream and see if hope comes back, knowing that having an ever-present reservior of hope is not the ultimate goal.
Here’s another post I wrote on dreaming: Advanced Dreaming: I Live in Philly Philly.
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