Why Everyone Should Have a Dream

I actually think it is unacceptable if you do not have a passion or a dream you are working towards. But wait, allow me to explain before you get the pitchforks out. What we often say is a lack of passion is actually just a lack of knowledge. To have a dream or be passionate about something is a choice.

A choice to devote yourself to something. Think about it, when you see someone talk about something they are passionate about, what do they usually say? “Oh I could talk about this for hours”. We often admire these people. But that doesn’t come by accident.

Passion isn’t something that will just magically happen to you if you sit there looking at everything at surface level and then ask yourself why you don’t care about anything in particular. It means you have to spend extra time and effort going deep into something in order to actually start feeling something about it.

Now, it isn’t necessary that everything you end up diving into will result in becoming your dream in life, but I do believe it is the path to get there. 

The thing is, as you keep trying different things (in depth that is) you will eventually come across the thing that you can’t stop being curious about. And the best part is, every single thing in the world can be like that. Everything has potential to go so deep into that you can never really truly learn it all.

If your passion is bugs, you could study bugs forever. If you love space, you’ll never run out of things to learn because the limit -literally- doesn’t exist. If you start dancing, you could practice forever and still have infinite things to learn and try. Every dream and passion is simply a portal into a never ending universe of something you might have just been orbiting around. 

But if you always hover at the entrance and never truly enter it, you’ll never really care either. You can’t say you aren’t passionate about guitar if you only picked up the guitar once, played a few chords, learned Wonderwall and then left it to collect dust.

You can’t say you aren’t interested in marine biology if you’ve never gotten curious, gone down a rabbit hole and learned everything about a blue whale and can tell me everything about its diet, mating patterns, and behaviour on a whim.

That’s all passion is. Sustained attention to things. Sure it may take you time to find your specific “thing”, but we also all have the ability to simultaneously create what our “thing” is. 

Something I always used to struggle with was actually having too many dreams. And I hear this a lot: “I have too many passions. I can’t possibly pick one. Why should I have to?” Yes you can and you should. You are not Sylvia Plath and the fig tree. While I understand the analogy, I hate it. Whatever path you pick is the right one. And if you truly like all of them and none of them stands out. It doesn’t matter either way. You know how I know?

Imagine for a second you were wildly successful and talented at any one of those options swirling around in your head. You would be happy with it. It’s just because we can’t control the outcome that we focus so much on the decision. 

So flip a coin. Roll a die if you have to. Just pick one. Because you won’t regret it when you are on the other side: When you’ve really embraced learning about a subject in depth, honed a skill or built something you only dreamed of, or when you’re deeply in love with something because you chose it and chose to pursue it.

If you think about it, picking a passion or a dream is a lot like falling in love with a person. At first, there’s a spark-curiosity, and attraction, followed by a brief period of obsession and infatuation, but eventually, you have to choose it. You have to commit. You can’t just leave because it’s hard or because there is the possibility of you falling in love with 100 other people. Yes infinite potential exists, but potential is not real. What you act on is. 

So why is it important to have a dream? Because life is too interesting not to. There are literally hundreds and thousands of things out there for you to explore. There are too many books unread, too many skills to master, too many corners of the world left unexplored. I refuse to believe that any human being is meant to drift through all of that without becoming deeply interested in something.  Every single one of us has so much potential, and it’s a waste to go through life and not tap into it. You don't need to become famous. You don't need to become rich. But I do think you should care about something. 

Deeply.

Obsessively.

Wholeheartedly.

Because do you really want to live your whole life without knowing what it feels like to be so fully consumed by your love for something that it gives your life meaning? Something that isn’t attached to a person. But something that belongs only to you. Something that can never be taken away from you?

Maybe you'll fail. Maybe you'll change your mind. Maybe it won't lead where you thought it would. But that's not the point. The point is that there is an entire world waiting on the other side of caring deeply about something, and I think you owe it to yourself to see it. To not only see what dreams are out there, but to see what happens when you dare to choose one.