Sometimes I wonder what the hell I’m doing even writing this blog.
I don’t think it furthers my ‘dreams’.
Tangent: Amazing that I put dreams in quotations. As if it’s embarassing to have dreams and I need to protect myself from people finding out that I have them.
And I hesitate to even write my dreams here. But I am going to do it. The trick to realizing your dreams is admitting that you have them. Kind of like alcoholics admitting they have a problem. Only with addiction, you admit you have a problem and have no control over your problem (although you then promptly try to take control by stopping to use the addictive thing). For dream realization, you’re in complete control. It’s all you. You just need to start chipping away at it one step at a time.
And really that first step is to be able to say what you want and what you want to do.
People’s identities are so tied up in their dreams. I feel embarassed to admit a dream I have because I have not accomplished it yet. My identity of being a person who one day could achieve this dream is threatened by the fact that I have not yet achieved it. So then who am I if not the guy who will eventually achieve this dream.
It’s even scarier to take a tiny step towards that dream. What if that step is a misstep? What if I fail at one of those steps? Now that’s really threatening my identity and scaring the shit out of me.
One of the exercises in “The Artists Way” is to write 10 times in your journal, “I am a talented and prolific ______”. The blank is whatever you want to be. For many reading that book it’s ‘writer’ or ‘filmmaker’. For me, it was ‘entrepreneur’. Which is embarassing because I’m not currently running a business that I’ve started. So technically, I’m not an entrepreneur.
But the exercise is incredible. It makes you so uncomfortable to write it. And if you pay attention to all of the little voices and doubts in your head that pop up as you write it, you can start to dialogue with those critics. You can rebut their critiques.
It’s powerful. Just as powerful as it is writing on the internet that I want to be a deeptech entrepreneur and take an important environmental technology out of a research lab and commercialize it into a startup.
So if that’s my dream why do I take precious time every morning to write these lame posts when I could be taking steps to further that dream?
I guess the practice of putting it out there, on the internet, and silencing those inner critics is/was the next necessary and important step.