The Life Cycle of Dreams Come True (or: How to Get What You Want)

A key aim of lifelong learning, which appears in my work with both WorkshOPD and the ThinkGold Group, is making dreams come true. If this seems like a lofty pie-in-the-sky, self-helpy ideal, consider this: why do we learn? Is it not to make our lives and our worlds better? Those are dreams that deserve realisation.

Recently, I have been blessed to be surrounded by a blossoming of dreams realised. A spate of friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues have seen the fruition of the visions they have nurtured, from publications to new business ventures to major sponsorships and more. How did this happen? In this blog post I propose the life cycle of dreams realised. In the light of my previous post, let us think of a dream as a seed.

The Seed – The Sprout – The Seedling – The Fruit – The Quiet Season

1. The Seed

Our dreams, visions and ideals come to us as little nuggets of unformed potential. Those great ideas – the great novel, the catchy lyric, the foundation for world peace – are lovely, but the details are hardly clear. Like a seed, a dream is a slumbering universe of possibilities. What we do with it determines what will be.

2. The Sprout

If we nourish a seed with water, fresh air, warmth and fertile soil, it sprouts. If we nourish a dream with constant attention, it, too, begins to stir into life. Of course, mere dreaming is not nourishment enough. For a dream to sprout, it requires deliberate, systematic thought. And as much as a seed needs water to grow, a dream requires action. Passively dreaming is unlikely to yield results.

3. The Seedling

As sprouts grow into seedlings, they become bigger and stronger. As dreams begin to take flight, they build their own momentum. Yet neither should be left unattended: the necessary action must be taken. For many of the people in my life whose dreams have come true, this has involved proposing their plans to people who can make things happen.

(In my own case, this has involved approaching my college to approve a consultancy agreement with a local institute, to which, in turn, I proposed the benefits of running my WorkshOPD course. I want to emphasise that what made these proposals work was not that I asked for something, but that I showed those stakeholders how they can benefit from something that happens to be an avenue to my dream. Everybody wants to win: when you make that possible, things happen.)

4. The Fruit

Visit a farm at harvest time and you will find that the blessed bounty of a full harvest presents problems of its own. All that fruit must be sent where it is useful, or preserved for the quiet season to come. When it comes to dreams, we are often so concerned about failure that we forget to prepare for the challenges of success. A great example is small businesses, which often struggle to keep up with demand once they take off. When planning for our dreams, we should also plan how to make them feasible, sustainable and, like the farmers, provide for the quiet seasons ahead.

5. The Quiet Season

Nature shows us that everything has a natural life cycle. Plants reach the end of their lives – but they leave seeds that can once again spring into life for the next season. Dreams that have reached fruition may wane again. This is when it is important to have provided for the quiet season. It is also the time to go and look at that new batch of seed – the new dreams – and begin the process once again.

What, you may ask, of dreams that don’t come true? My belief is that if a dream is nurtured and a way to its accomplishment is intelligently and actively pursued, every apparent failure is valuable feedback that will lead to heightened success. If a goal is actively and intelligently pursued, and this feedback responded to, there may be delays, but success is on its way. The only failure is giving up.

May this be a year where many dreams are nurtured and, in good time, brought to fruition.

For more on nurturing dreams into life, see ThinkGold Productions.

For tools to make it happen professionally, see my WorkshOPD Resources.

Illustrations: Marie-Therese C. Le Roux
Disclosure: I am a member of the ThinkGold Group and creator of the WorkshOPD course.