Follow Your Dreams – ( Article by my son Rohan)

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Recently one of my very close friends was involved in a car accident and he narrowly escaped. His car got hit from behind and it spun 180 degrees and he was facing the wrong way. He had the presence of mind to restart his car and turn his car around to avoid a head-on collision. He is fine and escaped unscathed. However, what this experience taught me that we don’t know what is going to happen at the next moment and we should live each moment to the fullest and follow our dreams.

Based on my personal experience and the people I know we all add certain conditions to our dreams like we want to work for 10 years and then pursue our dreams or some of us wait for our children to grow up and be independent. Invariably that moment doesn’t come and we live a life of going to do but in the end, all that remains is that list of to-dos. I contemplated on why do we put conditions on us and could think of two factors namely fear and lack of belief. Let’s look at these factors in detail and see how they hamper us every day.

Fear
If there is one thing that holds us back all the time, then there is the only word that comes to mind and that is fear. But have we ever stepped back and analyzed why do we have fear, be it fear of rejection or fear of not being able to make enough money. If we look around and analyze one thing that successful people have in common is that they are fearless. Take the example of Mark Zuckerberg, if he won’t have been fearless to drop out of Harvard we won’t have had Facebook. Most of us can’t imagine our lives without Facebook. Take the other side of the spectrum and if he won’t have been successful people would have said what a stupid guy that he dropped out of Harvard. Zuckerberg is not an exception, we have Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Travis Kalanick and the list goes on. Even take the example of your own life, when we are learning how to walk didn’t we fall but we didn’t have fear of falling and hence we learned to walk. When we were growing up did we stop playing sports with our friends from fear of losing the answer is no we went back the next day to win again? Fear according to me is nothing but a manifestation of our negative thoughts which constrains our ability. I have also had fears but invariably most of them don’t come true as fear is most of the times unreal and is only there in our minds and not in the real world. Swami Vivekananda who was one of the great philosophers had numerous quotes on being fearless and one of my favorite quotes is “If there is one word that you find coming out like a bomb from the Upanishads, bursting like a bombshell upon masses of ignorance, it is the word fearlessness”. So let’s try to be fearless and in cricketing terms play on the front foot, the worst that can happen is we would get out but we can always come back the next day and play those dream innings.

Belief
Once we become fearless we need to believe in ourselves and our dreams. We should have the passion to go out and prove to the world that we can make a difference. Till the time we don’t believe in ourselves how can you expect the outside world to believe in our dreams. In the initial phase when we start following our passion we are full of energy and positivity but as the time wears on and we don’t get desirable returns the doubts start to creep in. This is not because of the lack of effort but we start getting attached to the outcomes rather than the process. This is where we need to persevere and do all the hard work. Take the example of Chinese Bamboo tree, when the tree is planted there are no visible signs in the first year and this story continues till the fourth year which can be a source of the doubt if it were a real-life situation. However, in the fifth year, the tree grows to 80 feet in just under 6 weeks. Even if we look at the successful businesses like Apple it was the belief and perseverance of Steve Jobs that Apple became what it is today despite the company being at a low in 1997 when Jobs was brought back. The point that I am trying to drive home is we need to have the belief and perseverance if we need to follow our passion as we don’t know what might click and lead us to our 80 feet of growth moment.

To conclude I would like to say that the only person that stops us from pursuing our dreams is not anyone else but we ourselves. Let’s be the masters of our own destiny and make a future that we dream of as life is too short and we should make every moment worthwhile.

December 2018