Find What You Are Looking For

I have been writing a lot about dreams lately and here is another post for your reading pleasure. Next week, I will move on to more topics, but I think this is important. The biggest mistake we can make in life is to start chasing things that aren't our dreams. Instead of doing what we know we should be doing, we go after the money, the fame, the prestige, the American Dream. You can have all the money and toys in the world, but unless you are doing what you are supposed to be doing, you aren't going to find what you are looking for.

This is a hard lesson to learn, because it isn't what we are taught. When we are children and asked what we want to be when we grow up, no one ever says they want to be a struggling artist. No one says they want to struggle at all. There are a lot of answers of doctor, lawyer, princess, cowboy, etc. None of the answers are bad, if this is what you are supposed to be doing. We need doctors and lawyers and princesses and cowboys, but not everyone can be one or is driven to be one. We have to get better at teaching children to listen to that little voice, the one we have learned to silence for so long, and to do what is going to make them happy, not just wealthy. The struggle is what makes us great.

We tell the children they can do anything they put their mind to, but we then make them behave and sit in nice straight rows and speak softly and not daydream and conform and stop being so imaginative. We drill them with facts and numbers but continue to take away time and money from the arts. We get them on a schedule and convince them getting A's in every subject is more important than doing anything else because they have to get into a great college to be anything. Unless they are prodigious from an early age, we push them away from the arts, because there isn't any money in it anyway, and convince them to become doctors or lawyers or bankers because they can make money and live a nice life.

Why? Are you happy doing what you are doing? If so, is it because someone forced you to to conform and stop dreaming and buckle down to do the work you are doing? Or did you find your passion? If you are unhappy, is it because you let them force you to conform and stop dreaming and buckle down to do the work you are doing? The people who are doing great work today are usually doing it in spite of what others tried to force them to do. They dreamed their own dreams and blazed their own paths. They didn't believe the BS being force fed to them. Shouldn't we be training the children to do this? Shouldn't we want more for them? Shouldn't we be teaching them to think for themselves and to chase their dreams?