Remember those great ideas you get so excited about that you start visualizing everything going perfectly in your head? I call those halfway dreams. You may be wondering, "why is it only half?" Well, these plans can lead to the most exhilarating feelings in this world, that is, until you slam headfirst into a wall called doubt. The doubt wall is made up of all kinds of doubts and you'll hit it just around the same time you take the "Second-Guessing Exit."
This wall is one hurdle that we take as a sign to throw in the towel and stop before we really achieve anything at all. What people fail to realize is that in a race with hurdles, there is always a first hurdle, with a few more after that to be sure, but there is always, always, a last hurdle as well. We see the first one and send our dreams running for the hills.
The society we exist in projects images into our heads of what we should want and how we should go about attaining our dreams and it even tries to tell us how to dream. These images sometimes predispose us into believing we cannot do something which, I think, is a large reason for these halfway dreams. Maybe that's not it; maybe you have a dream so extreme no one else has even attempted to achieve it before. The wall of doubt you may encounter on this route goes by "fear."
Humans fear the unknown. We fear to fail and we fear what others will think of us if we do not or can not reach our dreams, or even sometimes, when we do.
Oftentimes these halfway dreams are not even just halfbaked ideas. We plan them out and are all set to go but merely stop in the middle after hitting an impasse. Sometimes we embark on these journeys and at one point or another pull a U-turn and head back into the waiting, open arms of familiar.
The unknown is scary, yes, but what's even more terrifying is the fact that we are living in a world full of people not chasing what they truly want. Almost all of us are slackers in that aspect. You may be the hardest working employee your company has ever seen, but if you're not living your dream, well, you're not living your dream. Okay so that sounded a little anticlimactic but it really is as simple as that.
