The Pursuit of Dreams In A Way That Helps Others Is The Meaning of Life Itself
“A boy has the right to dream. There are endless possibilities stretched out before him. What awaits him down the path, he will then have to choose. The boy doesn’t always know. At some point, the boy then becomes an adult and learns what he was able to become. Joy and sadness forever will accompany this. He is confronted with the choice. When this happens, does he bid his past farewell in his heart? Once a boy becomes an adult, he can no longer go back to being a boy. The boy is now a man. Only one thing can be said: A boy has the right to dream, for those endless possibilities are stretched out before him. We must remember; All men were once boys.”[1]
-Outlaw Star
Pursuing your dream in a way that helps others is the meaning of life.
To understand why this is the case, we must first understand what a dream is and why you have it.
It all begins with the concept that no two human beings are exactly alike. This alone is amazing. There are over six billion people in the world, yet everyone is still different. Human loss is so challenging because you cannot truly replace a person when they are gone. This is not to say that their spirit leaves us, but rather to highlight the singularity of the soul.
People are different because they have unique sets of skills, personality, and feelings. It’s a combination of God-given talents and circumstances of upbringing that are never exactly the same between any two people.
What this means — and this is very important — is that there’s no such thing as an “average person.”
There may be an average in the abstract, but there’s no person who is ‘average’ at everything. The idea that there is an “average person” is one of the greatest and most harmful common misconceptions in the human condition.
Saying there is an average human is like saying there is an average color or an average note on the piano. It simply isn’t the case.
An enterprising logician could feasibly calculate from hues what would be an “average” of all colors or what sound would be the “average” of all pitches, but this is absolutely meaningless because each color and note is unique and serves different purposes.
Likewise, every human has a collection of skills, some of which they are very good at, and some which they are not as good at. In other words, to use the language of the enterprising logician, every human is a collection of traits that are “below average” and “above average,” but there is no such thing as an “average person” and the concept of an “average” — when it comes to people — is as useful as teaching General Relativity to a sleeping caterpillar.
Once you understand this, you can take a leap forward into freedom from the tyranny of forced rank. You are not an average person because no one is, and no one is average because there is no such thing as an “average person.”
So, to use the language of the enterprising logician again, everyone — and I mean everyone — is “above average” in something. Everyone is blessed with something that makes him or her special. Everyone has certain things that they are good at or that they genuinely enjoy.
Critically, the diversity of this set is infinite. It is a kaleidoscope of possibility. Someone’s entire special thing might be their love of and ability to wake up early in the morning. Another person could be very good at identifying birds in the air. Someone might be an extremely fast reader. Another person might be very good at holding their breath for long amounts of time.
Many people make the mistake of trying to fit these special things into a category or taxonomy. Is it math or is it science? Is this basketball or is it football? Is this farming or is it mining? At a young age these skills are rushed into unnecessary and limiting categorizations, and kids began to identify with a certain category that may or may not fit what they are truly amazing at.
It is better to think, instead, about what actions you take that make you happy. Happiness is deeply personal and intimate. Only you know what it feels like for you to be happy.
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Happiness and pain are deeply linked emotions, yet they are not treated with the same level of respect. Pain is seen as the body’s warning system, and happiness is seen as some abstract state. However, they are both feelings that the body generates as a reaction to a summation of sensory inputs in your conscious and subconscious.
When rehabilitating an injury, we’re often told that if it starts hurting, we should stop. The pain is our body’s ‘canary in the coal mine.’ I argue that, similarly, if something is making us happy, we should continue doing it. Our body is sending us a message that the summation of the sensory inputs it is getting is moving us in a healthy direction.
True, there are some people — very rare — who are so sick that they naturally derive happiness from hurting others. These people we call psychopaths. However, the vast majority of people are not wired in this way, and much of the bad deeds in the world come from when a person is unable to find happiness in their own life.
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By now we have the two main ingredients for understanding what a dream is. First, we know that people are all different. Second, we know that happiness is the feeling that results from the way someone’s body and soul reacts to sensory inputs.
We can thus conclude that no two people have exactly the same thing that makes them happy because every person is a different collection of feelings, emotions, skills, and personality.
Of course, we know there are things most people generally like. We know there are needs for food, love, sex, and shelter. But these are broad generalities. In terms of what truly makes a person happy, it must be far more specific.
A dream is something the mere pursuit of which makes you happy.
Thus, the key is not the dream at all, but the pursuit of the dream. However, there must be a dream for there to be a pursuit. But that dream could be as simple as the ability to keep pursuing in a way that makes someone happy — even if you don’t know what you’re pursuing. Think of a singer who only wants to sing.
As an example, let us say that you are someone who is perfectly happy when walking alone in the woods. You love it, and you couldn’t imagine how anyone could not be in love with a walk in the woods. Ironically, there are people whose greatest fear is walking in the woods. These people were so scared when they watched “The Blair Witch Project” that they vomited in the theatre.
The fact that you like walking in the woods this much tells you more about yourself than any DNA test could. There’s something about your unique makeup that identifies with this activity.
What you know, then, is your dream is something that will allow you to walk in the woods as much as possible.
You need not go further than that to have a dream.
Some people may go further and decide that being a park ranger would be somewhat of a dream. For those people, they then may start to work towards being a park ranger, and likely the more time they spend in the woods, the closer to becoming a park ranger they’ll be.
For some other people, they may love rock climbing. For those people, that may become their specific dream, and then, again, even if they don’t know how to become a financially secure rock climber, by doing more rock climbing, they will move closer to becoming a professional rock climber.
For many other people who will not have specified their dream to that level of particularity, for them, it is key to understand that they can pursue their dream, even if they don’t know specifically what it is.
Because once people are able to financially support themselves while doing what they like to do anyway, they achieve the kind of happiness that I believe human beings are here to achieve.
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Consider the following story in Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke. It’s the story of a young man who trained for the military but really wants to write poetry. He contacts a master poet whom he admires, to seek validation or at least guidance towards poetry. He wants a sign that he’s good enough to be a professional poet, or at least that he’s moving in the right direction. The master poet responds with what I think is one of the most moving remarks ever penned:
“You ask me whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should avoid most right now. No one can advise or help you — no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write, see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write?”[2]
-Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903
The Universe’s guide is what internally makes you so happy that you feel it is something you must do. This is the guide. The dream, essentially then, is the state of being able to do this thing and support yourself while doing it.
Perhaps to some people this sounds naïve.
But everything at one point was a dream to someone.
Before there was a lawyer or a doctor, there had to be someone who deeply enjoyed practicing law or practicing medicine.
Before there was a professional basketball player or professional jazz musician, there had to be someone who loved playing basketball or playing jazz.
Consider professional stand-up comedians, as we know them today. It’s a job that didn’t exist until around the 1970’s.
Every year we see people-doing-what-they-love turn into a profession. There are now professional video game players, who get paid millions of dollars to play video games, and there are some video game championships with audience viewership well above that of the World Series.[3]
There are people living their dreams whose dreams were not articulable when they began to be lived.
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But consider how people can get upset.
Abraham Lincoln once said, “Every man is born an original, but sadly, most men die copies.”[4]
What often happens: people know they want to be happy, and they see someone else happy, who is living their dream. The person thinks that if he or she only did what that happy person did then they too will be happy.
But this is not how it works because, as I stated in the beginning, every person is unique and different from every other person. Thus, the sensory inputs that make one person happy, are not going to have the same effect on you, and, in fact, they might have an outright negative effect on you.
For instance, if you forced me to walk in the woods all day, I’d probably get sad, even though this makes someone else happy. But if I saw a clip, with great music, about how much the next man loves a walk in the woods, I may be tempted to go because I see him having so much fun doing it.
This is why prestige is so dangerous. I’ve never seen anyone explain this concept better than Paul Graham did in his now-famous 2006 web essay, “How To Do What You Love:”
“What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgment you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don’t even know?
This is easy advice to give. It’s hard to follow, especially when you’re young. Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.
That’s what leads people to try to write novels, for example. They like reading novels. They notice that people who write them win Nobel prizes. What could be more wonderful, they think, than to be a novelist? But liking the idea of being a novelist is not enough; you have to like the actual work of novel-writing if you’re going to be good at it; you have to like making up elaborate lies.
Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you’ll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind — though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.
Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That’s the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn’t suck, they wouldn’t have had to make it prestigious.”[5]
-Paul Graham
But if you follow your dreams, even if you don’t know exactly what they are, you will not fall victim to this. If you let your heart guide you, things that you could never imagine will happen.
The final step is to believe in God and have faith in taking the leap. I would tell myself before I took the stage that if God helped me get this far, He won’t leave me now. We are partners in this.
If the Universe endowed you with these skills — skills that no one else in the Universe has in exactly the same way — and you start to use those skills and follow them, then the Universe will move with you. It reminds me of one of the most powerful quotes I’ve ever heard, and one of the quotes that I first heard through the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
“We had put down our passage money — booked a sailing to Bombay. This may sound too simple, but is great in consequence. Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: ‘Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!’”[6]
-W. H. Murray
George John Jordan Thomas Aquinas Hayward
May 31, 2018
[1]High Existence, http://highexistence.com/quotes/view/a-boy-has-the-right-to-dream-there-are-endless-po/
[2] Rilke, Rainer Maria, Letters to a Young Poet, (2012), p. 14.
I want to thank Gabriel Mangabeira Unger, one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, for first telling me about this quote.
[3] See, Blake Hester, “More Than 360 Million People Watched This Year’s ‘League of Legends’ Mid-Season Invitational,” Rolling Stone (Dec. 21, 2017), https://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/news/heres-how-many-people-watched-league-of-legends-this-year-w514580.
[4]Lincoln, Abraham. AZQuotes, http://www.azquotes.com/quote/809154
[5] Paul Graham, “How To Do What You Love,” http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html.
[6] Goeth Society of North America, http://www.goethesociety.org/pages/quotescom.html
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