The Simple Truth that No One Told Me About Following Your Dreams

I'm not an organizational-behavioral psychologist, a life coach, or anyone who has any professional credentials for telling you how to run your life or spend your time. But I am an artist, a filmaker, an entrepreneur, and a dreamer. I'm not in a position to give advice, but I can tell you a story. There is one hard-learned lesson that I hope helps others, and I offer it humbly:

I really loved Star Wars as a kid - and I started watching the special features and documentaries for it more and more during the period in school where everyone began asking what I wanted to be "when I grew up." One day, while I was watching one of these documentaries I realized that there were grown men whose job it was to make Star Wars. I memorized the title of the next interviewee in the documentary and told it to my teachers for years. When I grew up, I was going to be a "Visual Effects Engineer." I didn't know what it meant, but the guy who had that title made movie magic - and I would too.

My obsession followed me. I didn't care how long it took, or how much competition I faced. I knew in my heart that I could do anything - and so I kept working towards my dream. One summer, I had saved up some money and so I started a lunch campaign. I took the only person I knew who made videos out to lunch, and asked who else he knew I could take to lunch, and I kept doing it. "Who do you know?" and "Who does that person know?"

During those lunches I would ask what advice these professionals had for a budding filmmaker, and I got one piece of advice repeatedly, "If you can do something else besides film, do that." Then I'd laugh politely. That was great advice, but I couldn't possibly do anything else, so it wasn't really pertinent to me. There are people in the world, I'd tell myself, who just have to be filmmakers, and they are the only ones who will "make it." They are the ones who could never be happy doing anything else, and that was me. My life was in the stories that I told, and I could never be happy until I was making those stories and sharing them with others - or so I thought.

And then I got married. I had a daughter, and then I had a son. And I began to believe (and continue to believe) that those three people needed to be more important to me than anything else. And so my dreams took a back seat, but I never let them go.

As my family grew I took more and more stable jobs, with less to do with storytelling and filmmaking - but I refused to let go of my dream. There were days when I thought if I just downsized my dreams to something that was attainable, I could be happy in accomplishing these new dreams. I told myself, I just need to find a job where I got to be creative, and I got to express some of my imagination, and then I'd be happy. But I wasn't. In fact, the longer and harder I fought for my dreams while trying to keep a family, the less happy I became. I was grasping at straws, looking for any way I could devote the time I felt was necessary to my family, pursuing my dreams, and to all my other commitments. I reached a personal and professional low point - I was diagnosed with depression and soon after was asked to resign my professional position.

There are a lot of entrepreneurs and motivational speakers who talk about burning the boats, or diving into a dream head first without leaving an exit strategy. This way, you are able and willing to devote the entirety of your being and all of your time toward accomplishing your goal, and it gives you the highest chance of success. There are movies, songs, plays, and podcasts that all tell you to go for your dreams. The message that you can accomplish anything you believe you can is so prevalent in modern media it is beyond being cliche - it's a cultural understanding. That's the American Dream, your sucess is out there waiting to be unlocked - no matter what your dream may be, dreams do come true.

My experience doesn't necessarily disprove those things, and I don't have much to say about them specifically. But the process I went through to come to peace with my dreams involved realizing that there was an essential element that those platitudes had completely missed. I, like many artists do, felt the constant need to express, to create, and just to do something with the overactive imagination with which I had been blessed. And I assumed that need was what I "had" to do with my life and profession. I assumed that was my dream, and that by pursuing it relentlessly I could one day do something significant and meaningful with those ideas and feelings. That was the dream that I took on. And chasing it made me very unhappy. Then, slowly, my art became mine again when I took it off the pedestal. I stopped showing it to people, I stopped working on it while others were around. It turned back into the expression of how I was feeling, and stopped being my ultimate goal. It stopped being my dream, and became just something that I did because that's how I felt - and I did it after everyone else went to bed at night.

And that's the paradox of unhappiness that I discovered about following my dreams. Following a selfish dream will never make you happy - it will only make you more selfish. Working relentlessly to enforce my vision of how the world should be only lead to dissapointment. Putting my ideal life on a pedestal and worshipping it by promising myself "One day, it will come true" lead me nowhere - and I don't think it was because I didn't stick it out long enough to "make it." I found true happiness  in the service of others - in the selfless expression of giving without selfishly imposing the terms or conditions of your service (like me saying I give service only in the form of film for you to enjoy). My love, for life and for others, multiplied as I gave it away rather than willfully clutching onto it in the name of artistic control or creative vision. It turned things around for me, and filled me with a deep and lasting sense of joy.

I'm a different kind of filmmaker now. I don't make the kinds of videos I dreamed I would one day create, but my videos help others. I've found the happiness and satisfaction I was looking for in the moments where I intentionally give, especially to my family. And the more present I am in those moments, instead of planning, dreaming, or wishing I was somewhere else or becoming someone else.

My daughter doesn't care about how famous I am and my son doesn't even understand whether or not I am making "high art." They both care about whether or not I am here, now. And not just physically, but mentally. They care about tickle fights and tea parties - sitting next to them meticulously planning my next project wouldn't count as "family time."  My time is no longer my own. I signed some of it away when I became employed, I gave what was left it to my wife when we got married, and then we together gave all we had to our kids when they were born. My life is not my own, but because I wanted to follow my dreams, I tried to strong-arm it into becoming what I wanted it to be.

I'm still an artist, and so that's still an ongoing struggle. My constant ideas feel so real, and they push and prod at the back of my mind, demanding attention. I feel that need to create, and I want to be recognized for it. What I've come to understand is that is just a want, not a path to truth or a compass pointing to my destiny. And in life, getting what you want is a mirage of joy, so I keep it to my hour after everyone goes to bed - like a toddler sneaking a bite of cake.

And that's the hard-earned lesson I wanted to share with you. I'm still in the middle of learning it, but it seems like a message few professionals are telling. You can do anything you put your mind to, anything that you pursue relentlessly. I believe you could, but I don't believe you should. I believe in your ability to achieve your dreams, BUT I think you'd be happier forgetting what you want, and giving in any way you can find to those who are most important to you. That's my new dream.