The Raw Material of Dreams

“So you’re telling me there’s a chance!”

Occasionally I hear people share of a goal they have in life, something immense to achieve, the dream sounds to my ear like someone saying, "I want to be an astronaut when I grow up." What I mean by that is that many dreams are nearly as hard to accomplish as becoming an astronaut.

If you want to be an astronaut, then maybe you decide to take the pilot track to get there? Perhaps you’ll need to first become a fighter pilot, which is like 1 out of 1,000 or more in the Air Force, I’m guessing. Then you can apply to become an Air Force test pilot, which is, I don’t know, maybe 1 out of a 10,000 fighter pilots? Then you can talk the Air Force into putting you through a bunch of school to get a science PhD (because only certifiable nerds go to space, not just test pilots), and that’s perhaps 1 out of 50,000 test pilots. Okay so after all this, then you can apply to NASA to be an astronaut, which is like 1 out of every PhD-holding scientist/test pilot/airmen alive at any given year. Oh, and surprise: you're going up against the nephew of the NASA administrator who is also applying the same year you are.

Of course, you may be so into the idea of being an astronaut that you’re reading this right now thinking… “So you’re telling me there’s a chance!”

But this is how a lot of dreams work. They truly are “one in a million” kind of dreams.

I had a dream to climb all the seven summits in the world at one time, and also to go to the north and south poles, what they call the “Explorer’s Grand Slam.” Since I was raised by backpackers (read: hippies), I spent a thousand times more nights in a tent than a hotel, and many more meals on the go in a canoe than in a restaurant. So I dreamed big by the time I was a young adult: I wanted to be an explorer!

I never achieved this goal, and in fact, never even truly started it in earnest, but I did do a good bit of backpacking, summited a few mountains, got a lot of gear and tried a few winter summits (failing several). I have some neat pictures of myself on mountains with crampons on my boots and ice-axes in my hands. So, was I a failure? At that one dream, perhaps. Did I become a “mountaineer?” Not really? But each mountain, each hike, was a goal along the way. Each problem in the hiking and mountaineering life was one to solve. Some goals I met, some I didn’t. Some problems were solved, others weren’t. I never reached even one of the seven summits, but I sure did enjoy the journey, quite literally, on all those hikes (well, there’s one I didn’t enjoy at all which involved us forgetting our food bag and having to eat only oatmeal for several days straight but that’s another story!)

What’s more, I didn’t order my entire life to achieving this goal. I was a weekend hiker. I started to enjoy other things, like reading and writing, or being a husband and father, more than I enjoyed hiking. Indeed, if you look at me now, you’d not say, “He looks like a mountaineer!” You’d just as likely say, “I bet the person with that physique spends a good deal of time reading and writing while in a seated position.”

That's how a lot of dreams in life work. The numbers may not be quite as difficult as becoming an astronaut or explorer, but sometimes they can feel that way. Fewer than 100 people in history have completed the Explorer’s Grand Slam, and 556 people have been in space in one way or another. So in some ways, I was dreaming about an achievement that I didn’t even realize was even more rare than being an astronaut. When we dream a dream we often don’t realize how daunting they are accomplish.

The real pain begins when realize our career goals turned out to be impossible dreams. Instead of vague weekend hobbies, these are the things we do for a living, or wish we could do for a living. The field we’ve chosen starts to feel so demanding and selective that we start to feel like the astronaut-applicant going up against the NASA administrator’s nephew. We don’t get chosen. We don’t make the final interview cut. Someone else you interview against is privately described to you as “a unicorn candidate.” And those are the more positive situations where you just get beat by someone else (which is hard, but hey: which of us really thinks we are the best in the world at something—there’s always someone better). But other times you just don’t hear back at all—your resume gets ghosted, your emails don’t get replied to, your query letter doesn’t merit a reply, or your manuscript apparently ended up in the trash. Finally there is what we all say we want but is still sometimes hard to hear: a rejection that includes painful feedback that really hurts your self-esteem even if they weren’t trying to. “We were just looking for someone more ________.” Ouch!

So this is where the distinctions between dreams, goals, and problems may help us all. A dream is a big huge vision for the future. It is often “over the horizon” and is more of an image of a preferred future life. What people don’t tell you is: almost nobody gets their dreams. Nobody. And a lot of people get what you might have dreamed of doing but they weren’t even trying to get it! Isn’t that frustrating? Have you ever heard someone tell their story of achieving the very thing you dreamed about, and for them it was no big deal? They sort of accidentally fell into your dream life, but only because of a series of random events and opportunities. They tell this story as a whimsical anecdote like

Jerks.

I’m kidding, they’re not jerks. But perhaps you know what I mean?

On second thought some of them are probably jerks, but just like a normal percentage of jerkness per a control group is all.

MEANWHILE… it can be better to do approach all this in a different way way: Sure, do some dreaming, but spend more time on achievable goals. Goals are things you can get done by summer, or the new year. Goals are what you plan to do this week or this month. Goals can often be accomplished almost entirely on your own or with a small team. Dreams are about inspiration. Goals are about progress. Dreams are ethereal. Goals are concrete. Dreams are hopes. Goals are plans. Dreams are about what could be. Goals are about what must get done.

The older I get I also think solving problems is just as important a concept as setting goals. I read a book called Stop Setting Goals If You Would Rather Solve Problems back in the 90s and it helped me realize that some of us are not really driven by goals, we’re driven by fixing stuff that’s not working, by responding to a problem that has arisen, or by breaking a project down into hurdles you need to overcome before it’s done.

I heard one innovative technology entrepreneur in an interview say that he just had an idea, then wrote a list of all the dozens and dozens of problems that needed solved to do that idea. Then he ranked them in descending order from hardest to easiest, and then started with the hardest one. After he solved that first one, he just kept going, and eventually he did it, something nobody else had done. He didn’t sound like a visionary dreamer. He didn’t set any goals or deadlines either. But he sounded like one amazing problem solving machine, doing something nobody else thought could be done in the process. Problem solvers can be innovators too, they just do it one problem at a time.

It’s okay to have big dreams, but don't trick yourself into thinking that your dream is an achievable goal, and thus build your whole life around it. The angst comes by thinking if your dreams die then you're a failure. You're not. I have dozens of dreams I've never accomplished—but I’ve gotten hundreds of real world things done and solved thousands of problems, contributing solutions every day. It is much more satisfying to have achievable goals and solve real world problems that add up to, over time, the raw material for some of your dreams to become reality.

And here’s the other part: growing older is allowing some of your dreams to die, or to laugh some of them off (like we do when my family finds an old picture of me on a mountain with an ice-axe—as a gift for reading this far you get to see some below). Or to adjust some of your dreams to dream about new things that align with what you like doing now, that you know your own gifts and the world better. In the end you can only feel the purpose behind those dreams, gain mastery over the disciplines that contribute to those dreams, and gain the autonomy that might enable you to chase a few of them. And even then you might not get them. That's okay. That's almost everyone. If you engage in loving most of the other parts leading up to it even a failed dream isn't a nightmare, it is a body of work you can be proud of having done, and continuing to do.