How do you become successful? Pay attention to your dreams. That’s DK’s advice. Here’s why.
Knowing what your dreams are is really important. You can be talked out of them easily or asked to sideline your own idea in order to take on someone else’s ‘dream’ and be asked to finish what they couldn’t, for them.
That happens. A lot. And it’s not okay, for someone who wants to actually do something that helps that person feel.., fulfilled. A tricky subject, this. But I’ll tell you what I’ve learned, from others, and maybe it’ll resonate with some who are reading here. Mostly, the feelings are, in the aggregate, to not give up on your dreams. It’s been said. Often. But who really knows what their dreams even are? Making time to investigate those kinds of interior questions isn’t ‘done’, and if it is, then you know, people you used to think were your allies start to… get mad at you for doing what you want and ‘I wish I could do what you’re doing’-you and it’s just annoying and dull. So yeah.
How do you push past all that?
Focus, for one, but also, editing.
Editing? Sure. You kinda have to. Editing out the things that are subtle moves designed (consciously or not consciously, doesn’t matter, if you’re on the receiving end it’s the same end result) to keep you from pursuing your own personal growth. I mean sometimes even our own parents try to get us to do what they want, instead of encouraging us to do what we don’t even know what we personally want. Or care about. Yet.
Maturity
Maturing starts with giving yourself time to explore, I feel. Kind of like a little plant needs to break ground, then get sun, then water, then nurturing in a loving way that helps it generate itself. Instead of being, well, pruned to fit someone else’s picture of what ‘a plant ought to be.’ First step in success, I feel, is getting rid of people who try to tell you who you ought to be. Editing, in other words. You have to do it. No, I mean, you really do, though. You have to.
You have to bat away a lot of naysayers. It’s kind of half the job, really. Swatting away what Guy Kawasaki called ‘the bozos’ when he said, in a talk that I’m sure is online somewhere, ‘Don’t let the bozos get you down.’
Can’t. Won’t. So I’m still gonna try. To make it: S P A C E. Big thanks to those who support our work with your donations to our crowdfunding page for #spacethezine. Could never have come this far without you;)
This poem I’ll share now, it’s for VH. (Thank you for introducing it to me, so many years ago. Maybe you do not recall it, but I do. I hope you know it helped me a lot, back then. And I continue to enjoy it.)
Dreaming big.
Where I am.
Cause why not.
‘Harlem’ by Langston Hughes
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Langston Hughes, “Harlem” from The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Copyright © 2002 by Langston Hughes.
Image: Alex Rodríguez Santibáñez. ‘Architecture + Urban – ⚡ Seeing beauty in the ordinary since 1987.’