“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” – Mahatma Gandhi

Your dreams are valid but it is also expensive to dream. “The price of greatness is responsibility” former British prime minister, Winston Churchill once quipped. The bigger the dream, the bigger the price you would have to pay to achieve your dreams and aspirations. You are going to be violently opposed by your family, friends, and allies but a few might get it but the more you continue to dream; the opposition gets bigger. If you cannot pay the price, you cannot win the prize. The moment you decide to follow your most audacious dreams, people would project their fears and insecurities toward you and your aspirations. The self-doubts begin to crip in especially when the projections come from well-meaning family and friends.

Albert Einstein once said

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.”

The moment you decide that you are going to elevate yourself, your thinking, and your way of life by dreaming big, be ready for the sarcastic statements, denigrating looks, and projections from family and friends. They want the best for you, they would advise you to take care, take less risk, and remind you of the impossibility of your goals and the improbability of actualizing your dreams.

As Mexican-Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong’o observed in her Oscar® for Best Supporting Actress acceptance speech for her performance in “12 Years a Slave” at the 86th Oscars® in 2014 “No matter where you’re from, your dreams are valid.” Achieving any worthwhile dream requires a lot of sacrifices, sweat, toil, dedication, commitment, focus, perseverance, resilience, and relentless execution. British Army Colonel T. E. Lawrence quipped in his memoir, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom:

“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”

Dreaming is cheap, we all dream but executing a dream is expensive. The expense is not only financial, but you would also pay by losing family and friends, and you would be mocked, laughed at, fought, ignored, chastised, denigrated, abused, ostracized, and doubted. We still have to dream in spite of the challenges inherent in following our dreams as it is not easy following through. Most of us give up on our dreams because it becomes tougher to execute as a result of the expense and the responsibility we have to shoulder to achieve greatness.

“So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.” ― Christopher Reeve

American-Austrian actor Arnold Schwarzenegger dreamt of coming to the United States of America as a young boy who grew up in Austria but his family had other plans for him. Arnold’s parents wanted him to become a policeman or military officer but from a very young age, he had a clear vision of where he was going. In his autobiography, Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story, Arnold recalls:

“It’s not unusual for ten-year-old kids to have grand dreams. But the thought of going to America hit me like a revelation, and I really took it seriously. I’d talk about it. Waiting at the bus stop, I told a girl who was a couple of years older, “I’m going to go to America,” and she just looked at me and said, “Yeah, sure, Arnold.” The kids got used to hearing me talk about it and thought I was weird, but that didn’t stop me from sharing my plans with everyone: my parents, my teachers, my neighbors.”

“In weeks that followed, I refined this vision until it was very specific. I was going to go for the Mr. Universe title; I was going to break records in powerlifting; I was going to Hollywood; I was going to be like Reg Park. The vision became so clear in my mind that I felt like it had to happen. There was no alternative; it was this or nothing.”

On your path to achieving your dreams, so-called experts are going to tell you why you might not make it. If you believe strongly in your dreams, you have to keep forging ahead in spite of the naysayers. Arnold advises “ignore the naysayers” as there will always be doubters and haters. Arnold was on the verge of breaking into Hollywood as an actor and he was searching for an agent. Most of the big agencies were not ready to take a risk on him. Here is what some of them had to say about Arnold:

“Look, you have an accent that scares people,” said the guy from ICM. “You have a body that’s too big for movies. You have a name that wouldn’t even fit on a movie poster. Everything about you is too strange.” He wasn’t being mean about it, and he offered to help in other ways. “Why don’t you stay in the gym business, and we can develop a chain of franchises? Or we can help you in lining up seminars and speaking engagements. Or with a book or something like that about your story.”

Some of the price that you would have to pay for achieving your goal might include ignoring the naysayers, having tough skin for projection by others, and having an unbreakable belief in yourself and your dreams. If following through on your dreams were easy everyone would it but it is not easy paying the price to achieve greatness. As motivational speaker Less Brown often said “If you do what is easy your life would be hard but if you do what is hard your life would be easy”

“It’s been said that there are only two pains in life, the pain of discipline or the pain of regret, and that discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons.” – Anthony Robbins

Meditation

Daily Calm with Tamara Levitt -Being Enough

It is easier to be happy when we are not burdened to continuously strive for more. In a research study, psychologist Dr. Tim Kasser found that pursuing material success leads to lower well-being and higher distress. So when we strive to acquire higher status, wealth, and possessions, we think those things would bring us happiness but the opposite may be true.
It is useful to step back from time to time and examine how our life philosophy connects to our state of happiness. If we find that our ambition is well-aligned with our well-being, perhaps we can disregard the judgment of others, they have their ideas of success; we have ours. If we feel there is a misalignment, we ask “Is my path really serving me?” or “Am I deferring my happiness to a future date?”.
There is nothing wrong with being ambitious or non-ambitious. What is important is that our choices and goals whether lofty or simple bring us fulfillment and meaning.
Daily Jay with Jay Shetty – Solar Power