The Importance of Dreaming

What do you want to be when you grow up?

It doesn’t matter if you are 8 or 80, you should have an answer. Shouldn’t each of us have an ever-growing bucket list? We’ve all been given this amazing gift of life, shouldn’t we dream of something great to do with it? 

Dreams don’t have to be large. They can be small, achievable, but they should always be clear in your mind.

I think we should all be challenged to dream. I believe dreaming is the bridge from our childhood, when dreaming was encouraged and life was less complicated, to our adulthood, when we are too often advised to keep our nose to the grindstone and focus on the task at hand. Dreaming is permission to remember the feeling of really wanting something, something that felt so far away, and yet just by wanting it, it felt real and attainable.

About 20 years ago, when I was still dreaming of becoming a journalist, I spent a summer embedded in two temples of our National Pastime, baseball. I had club access to the Chicago Cubs and White Sox organizations for the entire summer of 2000. That summer, I worked on a story about remembering childhood. I wanted to know if those who had made it to the Big Show had dreamt about being baseball players when they were kids.

I interviewed Ken Griffey Jr., Frank Thomas, Greg Maddux and Derek Jeter. 

When I interviewed Jeter, he walked me around the clubhouse, prodding some of the older players (in typical Jeter wisecracking fashion), saying there was no way they could even remember their childhood.

When I asked about his dream, he said he was living it. It was inspiring to hear a firsthand account of a person who had dreamt big and achieved it.

Like Jeter and so many other kids, my dream growing up was to be a baseball player. Unlike Jeter, that didn’t work out for me, but I did get to be around the sport. Later, my dream was to be a journalist. That one I did achieve. But I didn’t stop dreaming. I decided I wanted to be a business owner, and I achieved that dream as well. 

Now, my dream is to build an amazing company that changes lives and businesses by innovating content marketing. This is a dream in progress.

I have another dream, too. When I grow up, I want to be a great dad who finds happiness every day in his work. This, too, is a dream in progress.

So, what do you dream about? What are your wishes? Are you pursuing them every day? If not, why?

Dream, people. Dream.