But It Must Be Your Dream - Overachievement

Excerpted from
Overachievement: The New Model For Exceptional Performance
By John Eliot, Ph.D.

A dream need not excite anyone else on the planet. One person's dream can be another's nightmare. Some dream of being president of the United States; for others, including successful politicians, the White House seems like a lose-lose situation-shouldering the problems of the world along with attacks from critics on both the right and left. The thought of being a trader on Wall Street, for example, does nothing for me. I can't imagine that would be any fun. But I have a number of clients whose eyes light up when they talk about risking millions in the purchase and sale of stocks and the lightning pace at which decisions that determine a corporation's fate must be made. I certainly don't discourage them. In fact, I get excited listening to them talk about chasing their dreams.

My job is to help people find a dream that is not their mother's or father's or significant other's but their dream, and then to hold on to it, or find a combination of things that juice them. Some people need more than one dream to make life interesting, like Vaughn Walwyn and Paul Newman.

The Best Dreams Are Unrealistic

In buttoned-up societies like our own, people with big dreams can strike the rest of us as irrational or arrogant, if not a little bit strange. How many times do you think Thomas Edison or Walt Disney or Bill Gates heard the words, "Who do you think you are?" The good little American citizen is not supposed to get too big for his britches.

And we Americans are not alone in our pleasure at sticking big pins in big dreams. The English have a phrase, "tall poppies": When anyone grows beyond a "normal" level, his neighbors should cut him down to size, and fast. The Irish call it "begrudgery." Succeed even a little bit, and everyone in town will come up with a way to knock you down. And from what I know about life in France, Germany, and Italy, and most everywhere else, the pressure on someone who decides not to stay in lockstep with the majority is equally intense.

To hell with them. Exceptional thinkers ignore their critics and go about their business making history (or, like Paul Newman, use the scorn of the naysayers to fuel the quest). I earn a living helping people become better performers, and to do that I want to know what their dreams are. I have never wasted a second trying to decide whether a dream was "realistic" or not. It is not my job to evaluate dreams; my job is to try to help people identify the thing in life that gets them so excited they can't sit still. I have learned not to pause on how outrageous or silly someone's dream might seem by reminding myself of the extraordinary things people accomplish every day. No dream is impossible if it really gives meaning to your life. Even the dream with the lowest probability of being achieved can provide you with a lifetime of excitement, helping you step over the trivial disappointments in life, giving you something to work toward, making you feel content that you are living life to the fullest, right to the end of your days. Being "realistic" is too often an excuse for not working hard enough to improve. It also happens to be a significant source of unhappiness.

I often ask my students to come up with an absolutely impossible dream. The usual answers are "flying like a bird" or "playing professional hockey as a woman." I casually remind them of the Wright Brothers or of Manon Rehaum, a goalie who in 1995 was the first woman to play in a National Hockey League game, or of Canadian Olympic hockey all-star Haley Wickenheiser, who was invited to training camp in 1998 by the Philadelphia Flyers. The best answer I ever got was "Czar of Russia." We all agreed that today it would indeed seem impossible to become the Russian czar. After all, the Russians replaced Communism not with the old monarchy but with democracy. But then again, not so long ago most people in the world thought that any kind of political change in Russia was "unrealistic." Changing the government of a country may indeed be an incredible long shot, but if you really believe in it, history has proven it can be done. (No doubt critics of Russian President Putin have already pointed out that he thinks he's the new czar.)

The Difficulty of Dreaming Big
in the Second Millennium

America has always been a country for dreamers. The men who "invented America" dreamed of a new kind of nation where freedom ruled, rather than a king or a particular religion. We tend to forget that our country was created from scratch by a group of British colonial lawyers and intellectuals. It began with an idea of a new democratic republic, independent of Britain-a notion that was considered foolish if not absolutely mad by two thirds of their fellow colonists, not to mention the British Parliament. But men like Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin turned their dream into the American Dream.

For the impoverished migrants and squatters who helped that dream evolve into a world power within a few generations, and for the millions of immigrants who built the United States into a dominant global force by the mid-twentieth century, to dream of achieving more in life than their parents was not difficult. My friend Bob Rotella loves telling the story of how his own grandfather, at age thirteen and living in a poor village in the south of Italy in the nineteenth century, told his girlfriend that he would create a way for them to live happily ever after. Rotella's grandfather talked his way into a job on a ship, sailed to America, and made his way to rural Rutland, Vermont, where he found a job in a marble quarry. ("Rutland, Vermont," as Rotella likes to joke, "is a tough place to find today.") Three years later, the girl made her own way to Vermont, and they married and built a house. But Bob's grandfather fell victim to a tragic accident at the quarry. Bob's grandmother was left with eight kids to raise all by herself through harsh New England winters and the Great Depression. Bob's father had to take a job in a barbershop at age nine to help support the family. All the children grew up happy and healthy. Bob's own father raised five boys, all of whom earned Ph.D.s.

There are literally millions of stories like that in America, all built on the dream of becoming middle class. But today, most people are middle class. Not so long ago people boasted about being "an average American." But what's "average" in the new millennium? These days, "average" in the United States is a middle-class home owner with 2.45 kids and a two-car garage. But average is also being on your third or fourth job; constantly grumbling about your boss; being upside down with credit card debt; divorced or on the verge of a split; having lousy, estranged relationships with your children; being overweight by at least thirty pounds, and on your way to your first heart attack.

If you want more than that in life, you will have to come up with a better dream.

So-What's Your Dream?

When athletes, musicians, surgeons, and business executives come to me for help, they often spend the first hour telling me how much they love what they do. When they finish, I ask them, "Well, what do you want to talk about with me?" Then they spend the next two hours complaining about all the things that are wrong with their careers - how certain people or things are preventing them from achieving what they want to achieve. My response goes something like this: "Well, you certainly don't sound like someone who loves what you do." That tends to throw them off balance a bit, and before they can protest, I like to ask, "What do you really want to do?" or, "If you could do anything at all, what would it be?"