If You Don’t Follow Your Dreams You Might Just Get What You Deserve

Most of us spend a lot of our lives negotiating for things we want.

You negotiate with your boss about your salary. You negotiate with your wife about the color of the bedroom wall. You negotiate with the vendor about the price of his produce.

But why would you negotiate with your dreams?

I Must Be Practical

You might think you need to be ‘practical’.

But, for your whole life you have been nothing but practical. You have cocooned yourself into your neat little life where everything is safe and nothing can go wrong. You have lived according to the words of those who abandoned their dreams long ago.

You have lived according to the lifeless words of a society for whom dreams are a luxury they simply cannot afford.

How practical is your practicality?

This practicality that keeps you lifeless.

This practicality that keeps you tied to your appropriateness and prudence.

How practical is it for you to go on ignoring that which refuses to be ignored?

What If I fail?

You WILL fail. And though you may fail a thousand times, it is far better than living a life in which failure is not possible. A life of constant failure is also a life with a constant possibility of glory.

Read: 10 Reasons Why You Might Be Failing (& How to Change That)

Do not set out to try.

Do not inch closer to the cliff in order to peak over the edge. Fail! And in the falling, you will float through the failures and the successes and the possibilities that are available only to the one who is willing to FAIL.

I Should Have A Backup Plan Just In Case

Just in case?

You’ve lived just in case your entire life.

As long as you have a just in case, you will never leave just in case.

And the backup plans are sold to you by those who desperately need you to back up. These backup plans are hefty creations, aren’t they? These volumes in which people have outlined in every conceivable detail why it is that they will not succeed.

They have mapped the entire strategy to back up. So detailed, so comforting, so elaborate is this back up plan that they never have a chance to use it. For they never take a step forward.

In spending all their time creating a backup plan, they cement their existence firmly into yesterday. And in doing so they kill any possibility of tomorrow.

Pick up your back up plans. Place them neatly on top of one another. Invite those who helped you create them.

And as they are admiring these tomes, set them on fire. Let the smoke rise into the clouds. Let it be carried by the jet stream so that those in nations around the world can see it and smell it. The smell of burning bridges. The smell of boundless freedom. The smell of glorious possibility.

You have been told NOT to set off in search of your dreams until you have a backup plan.

I am telling you NOT to set off in search of your dreams until you have burned your backup plan.

Man is an eleventh hour creature. He acts only when his back is against the wall, when he is at the edge of a cliff, and there is nowhere else to go. And NOT ONE MINUTE SOONER.

If you have a backup plan, you will ensure your failure. If you succumb to practicality, you will have nothing but practicality.

I Cannot Live Without My Dream

You cannot live without your dream because your dream will not let you live without IT.

It will pester you and goad you and chase you into the dark and quiet recesses of your being.

It will demand its expression.

It will insist upon its exploration.

And the danger comes when you hear it no more.

The danger comes when you have become numb to its touch.

For then all is lost. It has died.

And you have died with it.

For as long as you cannot live without your dream . . .

For as long as it tugs at you . . .

For as long as it drives you to confusion and turmoil . . .

Living remains possible for you.

The question is not whether it is practical. Or whether you can afford to follow it. The question is whether you can afford to live a life without it.

For it will only chase after you for so long. And once it dies, your life fades into insignificance.

Dreams were never meant to be negotiated with. They were meant to serve as a reminder of your possibilities. A reminder of your greatness. A reminder of your humanity. They were meant to keep you alive in a world that slowly drifts toward death.

To negotiate with your dreams is to eventually live without them.

And to live without them is to never have lived at all.