"That dream is too big."
When we're young, our dreams are bigger than the sky. We dream of being larger than life, daring and bold. When I was six, I wanted to be a singer. When I was seven, I wanted to be an archeologist. Since the age of eight, I wanted to be a writer. The beauty of being a child is that everyone tells you that you can. You want to be president? You got it. You want to be a space cowboy? Giddyup. E.T. Even better, you believe them. You look in the mirror and see yourself in the Oval Office or riding your horse through space. And you dream even bigger and better dreams and they grow and grow and grow. I grew up with big plans of writing a novel. It was going to be bigger than Harry Potter and I was going to be the next J.K. Rowling. I would make a lot of money and travel and talk about my writing and help people follow their dreams too. Everyone used to encourage it.
But the older I got, the more things changed. And it hit me. When did we start people telling that dreams can be too big? You want to be president? Well, you need to come from good money and go to an Ivy League school, so good luck. You want to be a space cowboy? You get a weird look and "How much have you had to drink?" We start to contradict ourselves. We don't give encouragement for dreams like that anymore. When we don't get encouragement, we stop dreaming. Our imagination slips away and we just hope for a decent nine-to-five job with benefits and modest pay.
"Adulting" gets in the way of pursuing dreams that may seem further away than others. We want people to work hard and obtain "reasonable goals," but why not encourage people to continue to work hard and strive for a bigger goal? From my experience, it takes the same amount of energy to encourage someone to follow their dream as it does to discourage them, and encouraging them makes you feel better as well. Wouldn't we rather have a generation of kids raised to chase their dreams and improve their world instead of a generation of children with small minded aspirations?
So raise your kids to live within their imagination. Tell them anything is possible, and teach them all you can to help them reach for their dreams. Tell them the bigger the better. Give them the tools to strive. Help them to understand that the path to success isn't easy, but that it isn't impossible. Don't tell them that their dreams are too big. If anything, tell them to dream bigger. Walt Disney said, "It's kind of fun to do the impossible." We need more Walts in this world, and with the right attitude, we can all kinds of impossible things.
