Can You Follow Your Dreams and Find Success?

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Can You Follow Your Dreams and Find Success?

What if you could succeed by following your deepest passion?

You know—that thing you do even if in secret, so you can avoid ridicule, naysayers, guilt-jerkers, etc. Or, the one you’ve put on the back burner for years, maybe decades, because, well, you have bills to pay, kids to raise . . . .

What if you could succeed by following your deepest passion?

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Or worse, you’ve given up on your dreams because they seemed like folly.

Sound familiar?

Last week I posted about life happening when we’re making other plans. About unforeseen twists taking us down roads we never would have imagined.

And many of the responses caught my attention.

A lot of folks talked about their passions. And how they weren’t pursuing them because of all the real-life day-to-day grind. I heard from people privately as well, about how they hadn’t been successful with those dreams. How they’d given up, they were too old, etc.

You’ve heard the advice a million times these days (and lots of folks have become rich by preaching it!) that you can be anything you want to be; do anything you want to do. And be successful at it.

Well, I believe that to be true. But it also truly depends upon how you define success . . .

There’s even a huge bestselling book about doing what you love and the money will follow. It certainly did for the author, as so many folks bought the book . . .

But I can guarantee without going out on any limbs that just because you have the dream to write a novel, that doesn’t mean you’re going to become a bestselling author. Only so many of those exist in any decade. And millions of writers have that dream . . .

Annoying, isn’t it.

As I work with writers, I’m constantly surprised how many have “bought into” that belief—that they’ll become rich and famous. Will some of them? It’s possible. But you don’t really want to know the odds . . .

Still and yet, I believe into my soul (and my life experience has born this out), if you have a true passion for something, a golden dream residing high atop that shining hill, then the wherewithal to reach it lies within you as well.

And unless you follow that star, your life will grow dimmer because of it.

But reaching the dream I’m talking about is in learning, mastering, achieving the thing itself—not some outer award.

Let’s face it—if to you success means the latter, then get ready for a lot of disappointments. Of course we all know that if our self-worth is based on other people’s reactions, we have no self-worth at all.

In my own world, writing is my life. I love, love editing, which as I mentioned last week, I fell into and am quite successful.

But it’s in the writing of fiction where my life force flourishes.

Am I successful as an author? I’ve had 6 books published. The old-fashioned way—where publishers pay you for the rights to publish.

Am I rich and famous? Lol!

But I have an audience awaiting my next book. And nothing is sweeter to me in this world. When readers actually “get” those pieces of your soul . . . well, what could be better?

Funny too, that passion thing? If you want to be truly successful, following it also becomes a job.

We think of writers living this glamourous life, no? You know, Hemingway—writing in the mornings, drinking and swimming and fishing and drinking and drinking . . . all the afternoons away.

Course, as Hemingway famously said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Whatever your passion, I’m sure it’s every bit as exacting. That if you truly pursue it, you know exactly what the “job” part of this means.

Is it difficult to follow that passion and still function in the world, as per paying your bills, having a life, etc.?

Sure can be, can’t it. And we see various ways to affect this. While yep, if a dream drives you, not doing it will kill your soul, the starving-artist syndrome isn’t terribly productive either.

Seth Godin tells the story of an artist friend who worked as a grunt at a record company because music was his bliss. Godin’s question: Could his friend have better served himself, and society in general, by working as a schoolteacher during the day, then spending his spare time pursuing his passion?

A la Mr. Holland’s Opus.

But interesting question, no?

And one we must answer for ourselves.

Because in essence, we’re individuals pursuing our own goals, while simultaneously part of the larger cultural whole. The psychologist Carl Jung said that while we may be the heroes in our own stories, at the same time we’re also the spear chuckers in someone else’s.

What’s the magic formula? I don’t know about you, but I came down, and continue to come down, somewhere in that middle. I love my editorial job, love working with writers.

And I’ll also keep chasing that star. Not because I can’t live if I’m not a bestselling author, but because I can’t breathe very well when not writing.

Joseph Campbell had it right all along:

“Follow your bliss ... If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”

How do you function in this world and still follow your dreams?

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