Why You Should Give Up on Your Dreams
every.to
every.to
An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.
The Mexican replied, “only a little while. The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs. The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?”
The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.”
The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”
The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”
To which the American replied, “15 – 20 years.”
“But what then?” Asked the Mexican.
The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!”
“Millions – then what?”
The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”
-Dr. Faisal Jamshaid
My dream is to move to a different country that people who think like this are far away geographically.
Conversely, I suspect you're envisioning the kind of person who tries to put all those focuses on their LinkedIn profile, and I agree that person is a bit annoying and totally unnecessary.
Humanity can be really hilarious. Perhaps aliens don't contact us because they prefer just watching us on their TVs, as a highly entertaining reality TV show.
For some reason it reminded me of that quote: I wish women who read and follow Cosmo and men who read and follow "The Game" would get onto a spaceship and left alone to play their silly games on each other as much as they want, and just leave the rest of us in peace to date normal people who just want a normal relationship.
That being said - From time to time I do regret chasing my old dream, but I guess I’d only be more regretful if I didn’t. It’s ok to give up! But maybe at least give it a try.
Yup. I’ve done this and seen it happen in others. When I started my career, I could stay up late or pull an all nighter to focus on and clutch out some project, make a deadline, or whatever.
The first time I didn’t make it, was an eye opener.
15 years later I fell into a semi-related trap. Instead of getting help, I was pouring more and more of my time (without all nighters) into a project that was continually “almost there, except for this one thing...” and got negative but helpful feedback after a meeting where we had to “reset the plan.”
Any one of those earlier problems could’ve been addressed if I hadn’t tried to shield the team from them, even if it meant changing the requirements or budget. Instead, we got to the end, and had nothing to show but a bunch of partially-working pieces.
To me dreams are like religion - the longer it is since you gave up on them the crazier it seems that you ever believed. A dream is just some story you've made up, with you as a protagonist, and pursuing a dream means trying to bend reality to match that story, and then being pissed off because you can't
If you pursue the dream and achieve it, reality matches the story. To not match the story you must have not achieved it. I'm only responding to what you said, hardship doesn't factor into it.
I haven’t given up my dream, but getting that “something else” is working towards it.
owning a small business is the ultimate "be careful what you wish for" situation.
It's funny how the spark of an idea and excitement can fade once the reality sets in and doesn't match what was in your head. Endlessly plugging away at it, trying force the outcome you want through sheer will can be quite exhausting and defeating.
One surprising take away for me was that I missed having other people involved (it was a software project). Just having other people to be accountable to or some sort of other stakeholder that can help share the mental burden I think is key for the days when you feel unsure of the direction or purpose. I've done exactly what the article says and taken a step away for now, but hope to come back to it with a different approach and hopefully others involved.
> just enough money where I don’t care about money and enough control that meeting-spawners won’t get hired.
Implying you are wealthy and have oversight over most the company
As an old man once told me: Wealth should not be mistaken for riches. Wealth is the ability to generate richness and experiences. You can be ridiculously wealthy but poor as a bum.
I have no desire to be rich and most of us here are probably fairly wealthy.
As for "oversight over most the company" I have no idea where you got that from. I just said (in so many words) "I'd like the ability to fire/remove/never hire meeting-spawners."
> and enough control that meeting-spawners won’t get hired.
Ok, you want enough control to say that any meeting-inclined person cannot join the company. This means that every person who would join the company has to appear, to you personally, to be a non-meeting-inclined person, and that if you find them too-meeting-inclined, you can veto the hire no matter how many other people want to hire them. The logical conclusion is either that you personally review every hire, or that you adjust the hiring process to include an infallible "whithinboredom approves of this hire" check, which must be conducted by every interview cycle.
So, yeah, you now control the entire hiring (and presumably firing) decision process.
Welcome to HN?!
> Ok, you want enough control to say that any meeting-inclined person cannot join the company.
Ah, I see what you're seeing. I wasn't saying that, but I was. Between the lines, I was saying that I just want control to fire people who bring global productivity down. The reality is that this is a cultural issue (not having meetings except when actually necessary). Thus when someone is literally causing unnecessary meetings -- which to be clear, (un)necessary here is defined by the culture and peers, not by "me" though I'd be a large influence on that in the beginning -- they'd get reviewed as such by their peers.
I guess what I'm actually saying, is that I want the ability to have real and meaningful influence in a company's culture -- not just technically but socially as well. I like places that don't take themselves too seriously, where you have the space to solve hard problems if you need it but access to resources when you do. I usually see places I've worked where there were "meeting-spawners" (people who will soak up hundreds of man-hours in a single day to arrive at a conclusion that could have been solved more effectively in a single email) where you can't get the space to solve actual problems because you have days full of meetings about problems you can't get the space to solve that only need a few sentences of input from you.
Specifically, the only thing I want is the ability to continue providing a 1960s-era American middle class lifestyle to myself, my wife, and my children.
I've been fortunate enough to be able to pull this off for the past decade, but the little voice in the back of my head that keeps me up at night keeps reminding me that relying exclusively on skill & time capital can easily put me in a position of being unable to do so if I get unlucky enough or if our society suddenly stops valuing my skills.
If it were just me, then I wouldn't be worried. I'm tough enough to withstand living as a tramp like Jack London did in his younger years on "The Road".
But it's not just me. I have four other mouths to feed with my skill & time capital and neither my wife nor myself have any family to rely on.
There is no single path. But diversify to mitigate risks of failure.
One goal might lead to another more comprehensive one.
It’s about dreams calcifying where you become so focused on achieving “the thing” that you become unable to pivot.
i can support that. in pursuit of some dreams i had to give up others. some dreams i keep in mind, ready to pursue them if an opportunity opens up. but until then i focus on others that are actually reachable right now.
like when moving to china i stopped playing music (because i could not find people to play with, though later i actually did find some), but when i have to leave china, i can get back to playing music. that dream is not lost, it just took a back seat to other dreams. i have to choose which dreams are more important at the moment, but i don't have to completely give up a dream (i kept my music instruments and occasionally even practiced, so when the opportunity to play came, i was able to take it), nor do i force myself to follow a dream that seems impossible to reach at the expense of others that are in front of me.
Because once you examine it, it typically boils down to "well, ok, healthy X is healthy, but unhealthy X is unhealthy", at which point it's a tautology and totally useless advice, and probably serves more to promote a bias or an agenda than anything else.
But because people like platitudes, they omit the "if healthy elif unhealthy" part, and effectively lump the whole X onto one category that they feel more biased to, with a hidden 'caveat emptor' clause.
It's the same here.
Pursuing dreams is unhealthy -> Pursuing healthy dreams is healthy, but pursuing unhealthy dreams is unhealthy.
Vegan food is healthy -> Healthy vegan food is healthy, but unhealthy vegan food is unhealthy.
Exercise is healthy -> Healthy exercise is healthy, but unhealthy exercise is unhealthy.
Sex is healthy -> Healthy sex is healthy, unhealthy sex in unhealthy.
Liberals/Republicans are assholes -> Asshole liberals/republicans are assholes, non-asshole liberals/republicans are not assholes.
I dunno, it's just getting more and more tiring to have to filter all these arguments in this manner ...
Tarkovsky's Sacrifice film was on eye-opener: