“Kill your dreams” – the best advice I ever received
By: Jakob, Creative Director
Tags: Startup, Successful Entrepreneurs, Success Story, Business, Future

“Kill your dreams. Either make them a reality or forget about them and find others…” – a friend and mentor

I know the title looks like click bait, but it’s true. As confusing and even counter intuitive as it may look, the best advice I ever received regarding achieving your goals and dreams in life was just that – “Kill your dreams”. Let me explain…

With a personality that leans more to the artistic side, I had tendencies to spend my time not in the present, but in the future, always looking for a new way to change the world but not starting where I was. While my ideas kept being reshaped, the truth was simple – I wasn’t getting anything done, I only got better at pitching a dream to myself that I had no plan to start working towards, so what was the point.

While it felt like I was being productive, my dreams weren’t moving ahead, the stayed the same… just that – dreams…

Are you in the same rut like I was? What should you do about?

The crossroads

Let’s begin, make it simple, you have three choices:

Keeping dreaming and stay where you are…This will probably lead to frustration, anger and resentment down the road once you realised that ideas don’t come to everyone, and that your idea might have been a great one and the only reason you didn’t find if it was is because you didn’t take action. Forget about it… perhaps this idea isn’t for you, or you might just be in love with the thought of achieving your dreams and not the actual journey and destination. Maybe it’s not worth it, or you might have better dreams, more fit for you, to follow. There’s no shame in not chasing a specific path if it’s not for you. There is shame however in spending your life wonder “what if” and ending it with “shoulda-woulda-coulda”. Go for it… once you start, it’s not a dream, because you’re making it a reality. Most dream-achievers you’ll find were probably in the same position as you when they started: insecure, lacked experience, lacked supported and were unlikely to succeed… but they were crazy enough to go for it. And once they went for it, they realised it wasn’t that crazy to begin with, and so did everyone else who doubted them.

…You’ve given your idea so thought?

…Take your time…

…You decided to go for it?

Here’s what’s next…

Plan > dream, every time

A dream with actionable steps is called a plan. Dreaming, scrambling with notes, sharing ideas with friends and family, seeking advice, connecting with a mentor and doing market research is all part of the process, but it’s only the begging. Get started and get it done so you can get to work.

Practice makes perfect

Champions are born, they’re made.

Let me tell you a story:

When I was a kid I had a good friend named Christoffer. Neither of us were particularly industrious so when Christoffer one day announced that he’s buying a dirt bike to fix up, my nonchalant response was, “you don’t know how to fix bikes…”

In my defense, I wasn’t wrong, he had no clue how to fix dirt bikes… but that wasn’t going to stop him. His dream was a plan and he was acting on it.

Christoffer taught himself how to fix dirt bikes. He bought a dirt bike, fixed it, sold it and bought two. Then he did it again! He fixed the two, sold them and bought four that he fixed.

Time passed and Christoffer was now the kid who fixed dirt bikes and sold them. One day, he told me that he just sold all his bikes to buy a DJ set, because he was going to be a DJ.

Not having learned anything from our last instance, I told him “You don’t know anything about being a DJ…”

Long story short, 15 years later, he has been a successful DJ for a long time now, and is only getting started.

Christoffer is my own personal encounter with someone having the grit to go after what he wants to do, not caring about what the people around him think.

Sorry for doubting you Chrille, keep it up 💪🏻

Trial by fir e - can you push through?

“It’s easy to get in to Uni, it’s harder to get through.” – @Dad

While getting started and overcoming mostly personal hurdles isn’t easy, bringing your idea to fruition is harder.

Receiving funding, running a business, staying within budget, finding people, logistics, marketing, branding, customer services and accounting are just some of the plates you might need to spin to keep things going if you dream is to make something bigger than yourself.

Unfortunately, Instagram influencers, Hollywood and social media in general has done you the disservice to think that making it is easy, giving thousands the motivation to start but not to push through when things aren’t exciting and fun.

The question is, when you haven’t had a “Win” in a while, when you messed up a few too many times, when clients and customers aren’t knocking at the door and when you’re just having a 💩 day, can you push through?

Another piece of advice from my old man that I got when I told him that I didn’t want to go to sport’s practice one rainy evening, that’d id rather take a day off:

“What makes you successful isn’t doing the work when you want to, it’s doing the work when it’s the last thing you want to do.” -Dad

You don’t know, until you know

“Every task has two parts, the start and finish, and sometimes they’re both equally hard” -Dad

There are two many fields of expertise, to many markets, to many careers and to many paths and ladders to success than there are sands in the Negev desert, so how do we define success?

Looking at successful people who made something great and achieved their goals, I can only find one thing in common between them — they did it, and they once got started, just like you might do…right now.

Is this the right challenge for you? Are you the right person for the task? Is it worth it? Will you succeed?

There’s only one way to find out…

Good luck,

Jakob