"Follow your dreams," some people say. Even if you aren't one of them, odds are you've either been told that, or at least have head it been said. Which makes sense because that's pretty awesome advice, right?
I think so, but I also believe that many of us look at that advice in the wrong way. Anytime someone says something like the quote above, the word dream is always plural, therefore indicating that there is more than one dream, yet we rarely treat it that way.
More often than not, when someone says that they want to follow their dreams, they have one very specific dream in mind. So what's the problem with that exactly?
The fact that so many have this mindset actually never occurred to me until I watched this YouTube video by Olan Rogers. (If you've never seen any of his videos, I strongly suggest that you take the time to watch some of them.)
In the video, he touches on the subject of dreams and how we can get so caught up with chasing down one specific dream that we don't allow ourselves to be happy with the other awesome things we're doing with out lives right now. (He starts to talk about this around 2:30 in but I suggest watching all of it).
He talks about how he wanted his dream so badly that it had gotten to a point where it was stressing him out and even making him unhappy. It wasn't until he learned to appreciate and be happy with what he has and is accomplishing that he started to feel happy again.
Because the thing is, we can have more than one dream. Actually, we should have more than one. We should have as many as we can come up with.
The thing is though, we shouldn't let these dreams give us "tunnel vision" as Olan put it. Anytime we accomplish something that's less than our dream we see it as a failure; that's where we mess up.
Instead of viewing the things we accomplish as not being our end goal, we should take the time to see if that makes us happy as well. Because like Olan said, you could end up finding out that you love to do the thing you thought you "had" to do in order to reach your dream more than the actual dream itself.
Which is great, because that just means you've discovered a dream you didn't even know you had. Which is great of course because you can never have too many dreams.
So don't stress about whether or not that one dream you're going after happens. Dream new dreams and find other things along the way that make you happy. Because in the end, you can basically sum up everyone's dreams into the same sentence: to be happy.
