Several years ago, a television interviewer asked Sophia Loren the secret of her success. The actress didn’t hesitate for a moment. “I am successful,” she replied, “because I was willing to give up being anonymous.”
It appears that anyone who ultimately achieves their dreams has a clear idea what the trade-off was that was needed to accomplish it. It’s a characteristic often lacking in those who attribute their lack of success to bad breaks, circumstances over which they had no control or lack of money.
Money, in fact, becomes a popular scapegoat in stories about failure.
Most often, however, our dreams are created out of time, not money. In Jean-Louis Servan-Schrieber’s The Art of Time, he makes this startling observation: “We think much more about the use of money, which is renewable, than we do about time which is irreplaceable.”
Here’s the fascinating—thought often overlooked—truth about what we get in life: everything we have, whether we are living our dreams or not, is acquired by making a trade.
We trade our time, our talent, our experience, our attitudes for the lifestyle we create. Sadly, many people also trade in their dreams, settling instead for a less than satisfying life because it may seem easier or quicker to achieve the ordinary.
Nowhere is this more poetically illustrated than in Paulo Coelho’s little gem The Alchemist. The hero of this tale is Santiago, a young Spanish shepherd, who has already traded in his parent’s dream for him of becoming a priest for his own dream of traveling.
Along the way, he encounters a wise man who prods him to achieve his personal destiny. To add motivation, the wise man points out a number of people who traded in their dreams for a seemingly secure life.
One of them is a shopkeeper who resists his lifelong dream of a trip to Mecca. At one point he says to Santiago, “Today, I understand something I didn’t see before: every blessing ignored become a curse. “
What the shopkeeper demonstrates so poignantly is a universal truth. When we trade off our dreams for a lesser life, we are doomed to unhappiness.
On the other hand, if we trade off our fears and doubts for our own dream quest, satisfaction and joy that we have never known before are inevitable.
So is there anything you still need to trade in order to be living your dreams? Since all life is a trade anyway, why avoid what you really want? You’re already spending your time and energy doing something. Make it count.
Don’t you think dreams are a better investment than drudgery?
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Hi,
Instead of spamming your blog like the comment above, I’ll actually leave a valid comment.
I’m 45 and I’ve created one successful business and I’m working on a second all while working a “real job” with benefits part-time. I’m ready for a change now. The part-time job now feels like drudgery and the only reason why I continue with it is out of fear. I’m lucky to have benefits through my husband but as a one-time single mother who struggled for years on her own, the fear of one day being on my own again, without benefits stops me in my tracks. This is the one fear I have that keeps me moving forward to full-time self-employment, the thing I feel will make me happiest.
That fear of one day being without health insurance is the trade in that keeps me from living my dreams. When I write it down, it seems such a trite thing and I know that chances of it happening are slim but I still can’t get my mind past it.
Melissa,
Of course, health care is a concern. However, the shift that we make when we trade in our employee mindset for that of an entrepreneur is that we focus on creating a business that provides everything we think are important.
While we hear stories about the difficulty of getting coverage, most people have never actually shopped for health insurance and may be overestimating what it would cost. I always have had a fairly large deductible and mainly invested in catastrophic care which was a very affordable option.
Wondering how I failed to delete the spammer above!
Thanks for your quick response Barbara. I have a blog and sometimes my spam filter misses a comment. Spammers are pretty smart and they leave what looks like a valid comment but I can usually read right through it. The tell-tale sign is they link to a business site.
Re: insurance I’m hoping with Obamacare our options will increase and be more affordable admittedly I have not researched it extensively. Maybe once I do the fear will grow smaller.
Thanks!