Yeah, what if everything you’ve dreamt, put energy and lived for never materializes. Setting goals, articulating and pursuing them may not guarantee that you will be successful but not doing so guarantees failure.
Reality: sometimes we fail to achieve despite our commitment and vigour. I don’t want to be negative in any sense. Nor do I use being “realistic” as an excuse to be sombre and perhaps depressive. Though failure can be debilitating it can also be a catalyst for pivots, a change in course that causes unimagined and unanticipated success.
Before I get too carried away let me reiterate, make another point or two…
So, as much as we believe and do all we can to make our beliefs real, possibility of failure, despite contingencies is real. Seasoned leaders and the distinguished will tell you that failure is always a possibility.
You probably can find many examples of people who failed and are still grieving their dreams. Grief is a healthy thing. What can be unhealthy about it when people never move from there. It is supposed to be a healing process. One from which you emerge stronger and wiser, endowed with greater potential and capacity for more than you initially dreamt.
So, what if you never realise your dreams?
I’m generally allergic to clichés. However, some of them are laden with truth. I don’t want to be insensitive either, but if you never achieve your goals or dreams, it is really not the end of the world. It is just the end of a dream. It is not the end of your life (or organisation) just the end of a significant chapter.
Never achieving a dream doesn’t mean you’ve lost your ability to dream again. It just means you need to find the will to do so again. It means you may need to ignore feelings of failure, to battle disillusionment.
There is a lesson in failure for all of us: our dreams are not the sum of our lives, but our ability to dream over and over is what defines our lives. Happy is the man who can dream again. Successful will be the man who can walk away from dreams that turned to nightmares and dare to dream and pursue yet again.
As passionate as we can be about success we must never be naive about the possibility of failure.
The challenge on missing your dreams is determining whether to try again or bury them. Neither is easy, but both are necessary for your own good. You must act. Despair must never paralyse. Never allow shame to taint yet another attempt. Pour yourself again, into another pursuit.
In your failure you have know achievement. In your attempt you have made something and some people more beautiful. No contribution to your betterment and that of others is ever wasted. Dare. Start. Dare. Hold fast.
[Image: Gratisography]