Going after a dream has a price.
It may mean abandoning some freedoms, it will probably bring a few hardships, and definitely the occasional disappointment. But whatever the cost it is never as high as the price paid by people who didn’t live.
Are you a leader, founder or pioneer with a dream, laying awake worried that it’s turned into a nightmare? Harder than you thought? What’s stopping making it work? Is this really what I had in mind? The pieces all fit together and yet everything is falling apart?
Compromise will suck the life out of you and the struggle will make you burn. I feel you!
Ideas make the world go round.
Ideas are dreams. They inspire us all. Dreams have the power to ignite everyone and drive everything.
A small business, an innovation, the desire to completely change an industry — each one a dream when it started out.
Depending on your definition, dreams can be tricky devils to bring about.
What I Had In Mind
It’s often the case that a pioneer/founder is great at the dream but dreadful at making it happen. It takes a team to build a dream.
Maybe the dreamer can articulate the plan. At least well enough to turn some smart heads. But the real trick is collating/curating all the bits of the plan from all the smart minds and making certain that adds up to the dream.
Dr King gave the ‘I have a dream’ speech, not the ‘I have a plan’ speech. He was smart and knew sharing the idea would be the way to bring about the change he had dreamt about.
Don’t Take It Personal
To a founder, the team looks real enough. Don’t be fooled. The chances are 99% that you didn’t start a business that’s identical to anything else.
The team will be just as at sea as you.
They will buy the dream but their plan will be their more limited/expert take on it. No matter how hard you try their dream isn’t really yours.
It may be their plan is a tactical step towards your dream but a thousand startups a day fail every day because the right plan didn’t get built to deliver the truly viable dream.
Parts of the plan will almost certainly not be present in the team and getting it to one plan is a heavy lift.
But it’s possible.
Make No Mistake
For a business, an innovation or an entire industry to change both the dream and the plan is required.
What will never work, because humans are involved, is a plan so precise and final that people can’t own their own part of it.
Getting to the plan part can be one of the biggest opportunities a big dream has of survival.
The best plans are in some way altered by the people involved so they have their own fingerprints are on it. They will own it.
This is life or death to the bigger dream.
The Dream Team
What always works is a dream shaped, in large part by those who will help to execute it.
A business is made up of dreams and plans. And because the world works as it does they are entirely entangled. Getting each individual to upload their own partial plan as part of building the bigger plan is the job.
A leader's job is to help the team turn the dream into reality. And that demands limitless patience. A true master of patience has the capacity to educate. To show others a better way forward.
I can easily fail at this.
“Patience is the art of concealing your impatience.” — Guy Kawasaki
Reality Strikes
Change is inevitable. Progress is optional.
Just as people change and forget to tell each other, the real world ignores the struggle of business. Each day the dream is shattered and upset — the plan gets refined and the team rebuilds.
Well, that’s the dream.
It’s probably completely impossible for most businesses and the best we can hope for is to be perpetually prepared. Prepared for pretty much anything — always anticipating that almost anything can and will happen.
“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
Working at that level takes extraordinary patience and determination by everyone — it’s a brutal existence.
Everyone has to draw on untapped reserves. Pragmatism, hope, trust, and attention have to overcome disbelief, frustration, self-doubt and imposter syndrome.
Always thinking and reimagining what could be. Always safeguarding the dream and forever removing what may become barriers.
“Don’t get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can’t do anything, don’t get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it’s ready to come undone. You have to realize it’s going to be a long process and that you’ll work on things slowly, one at a time.” — Haruki Murakami
First published in The A-Z Of Group Partners on Medium in 2022. See the original.
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