Keep Your Dreams to Yourself Unless…

Once you find the dream you want to accomplish, keep it to yourself. Keep it to yourself, unless….we’ll get to the unless part in just a second.

At the point where you’ve decided what dream you’re going to pursue, your dream is analogous to a seed that has just been planted. It’s in a delicate state.

If you try telling people your dream at this infant stage, 9/10 times the people you tell will inadvertently or maliciously crush your dreams and you will find that it’s from the people you’re closest to.

They don’t mean you any harm; it’s just that they will automatically inject fear and doubt into your plans, rendering them inept. Call it human nature, call it fear, call it worry, call it whatever you want, it happens.

For example, let’s say you announce to your friends over dinner that you want to open up a landscaping business. I guarantee you that you will get at least one of the following responses.

“Opening your own business is a lot of work. Did you know 90% of businesses fail?”
“How are you going to compete with the other companies?”
“Where are you going to get the capital? Borrowing is risky, because if you can’t pay it back, you’re liable and you’re going to have to file for bankruptcy and that will ruin your credit.”
“Be careful, you’re going to have to keep track of everything or the IRS will get you.”
“I know a guy who started his own business and then he lost everything.”

Notice how quickly they are to poke holes in your dreams. This can be due to either two reasons.

1) They don’t want you to succeed.
2) They genuinely care about you and don’t want to see you get hurt.

You know why the vast majority of people don’t want you to succeed?

It’s because they see in you what they fear to do.

The sight of you going for your dreams reminds them of their lack of courage to do so.

They secretly want you to fail.

You will find that 99.9% of the people in this world want you to fail. Even though they may seem like they want you to succeed, they secretly want you to fail.

They want to see you defeated in order to justify their own cowardice.

However, some of your friends may have good intentions.

They truly don’t want to see you get hurt, so they advise you of the ill consequences, but that just causes more harm than good, because it makes you second guess your dreams when they are in the infant stage.

Here’s the unless part.

If you do decide to tell a person your dream, be very picky. Choose someone who will light up at the sound of your plan, get excited, and encourage you to go for it. However, these types of people are very lacking nowadays. But seek them out anyways and habitually associate with them.

The reason why I wrote this post is because I’ve had experiences in which I disclosed my dreams to those around me. I listened to them talk me out of my dreams and I let some of them slip by because of it.

Then one day, I decided to pursue one of my dreams anyway, despite all the negativity surrounding me. That dream was to get into UCLA.

I made the mistake of telling people this dream early on and as a result, got a lot of negative feedback on how I didn’t have the grades, the test scores, or the extracurricular activities to get in. This feedback was given to me by my fellow classmates and teachers. But you know what? I still made it happen and I can tell you its one of the best feelings in the world to be able to do something that people have said you cannot do.

I’ll be honest, there were times when I doubted myself because of all the negative feedback I was getting, but I managed to keep going, BARELY. Listening to all that negative feedback can really take a toll on you. Had I kept that dream to myself early on, I’m sure it would’ve been much easier on me and I would not have doubted myself as much.

So keep things to yourself for now, until you have made significant progress and can toss away any fear or doubt that’s directed toward you and your dreams when you disclose them.

If you have already told people your dreams and have been met with negative feedback and have become discouraged, I leave you with a final tale to encourage you to move on.

Many years ago, a famous race was held on an extremely high and steep mountain. Men from all over the world came to compete to climb to a specific marker on the mountain within a time limit of 15 minutes. Since the marker on the mountain was so high and the terrain so steep, nobody in the crowd thought that it was possible to reach the maker in 15 minutes.

The starting gun fired and the men quickly started up the mountain. One by one, they started to quit out of exhaustion. The crowd, seeing this, shouted:

“It’s too high.”
“Nobody will make it.”
“The terrain is too steep.”
“There’s not enough time. See how everybody’s quitting!”

Upon hearing these jeers from the crowd, other men began to quit as well.

But one man didn’t. He kept on going. The crowd took note of this and looked at the countdown on the clock and yelled even louder that it was impossible, that there was no way he could do it with the time remaining.

He reached the marker in under 15 minutes and became victorious. When he came back down the mountain, the crowd swarmed him urging him to tell his secret.

What was his secret?

No special secret.

Turned out he was deaf.

Unless you have somebody you trust that will encourage you to go for your dreams, keep it to yourself.

However, if you do decide to tell people (I recommend you don’t early on), remember not to listen to their negativity. It serves no useful purpose.

Just keep at it and prove them wrong.