Partner Article

Dream On!

~~‘Living in a dream world’, ‘got your head in the clouds’, ‘day-dreamer’. We all know the clichés. They tend to be derogatory, the recipient accused of ‘wishful thinking.’

Like all clichés though, they tell a certain truth. If we spent all our time dreaming about what could be, or what might be, we’d get precious little done.

But what if we build our dreams into the reality of our lives? Or, if it is a dream you have for your business, into that?

When I set up my own business, Writing Works, my main concern was, quite rightly, that it put food on the table and pay the bills. But I also set it a strategic goal: to get to being a published novelist. Well that sounds fine and dandy, but then I was faced with the dilemma of how to make that dream come true.

So I set myself goals. The first goal was, not surprisingly, to write something! That required time, mostly, time to write. So I built time into my business plan, some time each week to spend on my own writing. And slowly, over the past several years, I have used that specially allocated time to write a couple of novels. The next goal is get a literary agent, who then looks for a publisher. Another step to realizing the dream.

Like all writers, I have plenty of rejection slips for my efforts. (The joke used to be that you had enough rejection slips to plaster your wall. Well, rejection slips tend to arrive by e-mail these days so the writer joke is having enough rejection slips to use as wallpaper on your computer.)

But, reaching for the dream goes on. At the end of each year I review my success in achieving goals and reset the outstanding ones, such as finding a literary agent. I know it will take time and maybe it won’t happen.

That’s the thing with wanting to make a dream come true. They have to be grounded, in reality, in the raw material that is your life. I have listened to various ‘motivational speakers’ and such-like on several occasions and come out of the room thinking, ‘what a load of waffle.’ Because there really is a difference between reaching for dreams rooted in the reality of your life (I can’t think of a shorter phrase to sum up what I mean) and, literally, ‘living in a dream world.’

Maybe every business, every individual, needs a dream, but then they need the means by which to reach out for it. And of course, that must be fully informed by the knowledge that success is not guaranteed, nothing is certain, nothing is written in the stars.

But without dreams, life is truly a dreary experience.

I have learnt one great truth: never give up on your dreams, do not let the nay-sayers and doom merchants destroy them.

In the end, maybe, just maybe, the dreams win out.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Christopher Rooney .