I have heard it said…

“If you want to make your dreams come true, the first thing you must do is wake up.”

We often use the words “dreams” and “goals” interchangeably.  This practice probably causes no intrinsic harm but this quote made me wonder.  Could it be that deep down we understand the nuanced difference between these words, and then by allowing ourselves to use these words interchangeably, we allow ourselves to be lazy and fumble the ball short of the goal line?

A dream is an idea, often a bit abstract, often hazy, and all too often rather general.  Dreams figuratively and sometimes literally float in our mind as something we would love to do, love to be… and like a cloud they are beautiful, they can morph from one object into another in our “minds-sky”, and they are tied to nothing but the breeze of our imagination.

That is not to say that we do not from time-to-time have very specific detailed dreams for our life.  We do… but in my personal experience, something I refer to as a “dream” is usually something focused on a “destination,” something I see as my “moment of arriving.”  It is very rare that I characterize the step-by-step (often mundane) process of getting there as “my dream.”

A goal, on the other hand, seems to come with a slightly different but vitally nuanced color to it.  When I call something a goal, this goal is rarely contemplated without also contemplating the plan directly associated with that goal.  A goal requires a plan.  The basic definition of a goal is something that results from the execution of a plan.

We casually use the words “dream” and “goal” interchangeably, but I now wonder whether doing so degrades one and gives an undeserved sense of accomplishment to the other. Having a dream is easy… just fall asleep or daydream about something you love, would love to do, or would love to be. Having a goal is hard. To have a goal (a real goal) requires a plan to get you there, and making plans, much less seeing them through, is VERY difficult.

I can hear you now… “You are just playing semantics!”

You would be correct.
I am.
But that’s my point.

Words matter.  The ones we use to describe our world, ourselves, our actions, all come with underlying ideas and meanings. If we refer to something as a “goal” but have NOT done the hard work of putting a plan together to get there, then we are essentially “building a roof, without first building a foundation”… and somewhere deep inside of us, that lazy part of our brain throws a party and says… “See there, progress, we are getting things done, we have a goal, which means we have a plan, which means we did some real work here people, and one day soon this dream will be a reality.” Nope. More times than not, what we have is a DREAM, not a GOAL.  No work is required for a dream.  It is something we fantasize about, something we would like to be a reality, but because we have no plan, because we prematurely call it a “goal,” we never “wake up.”

A dream will never come true unless you wake up and live it. Ideas without plans are just dreams, they are pretty clouds, but good luck ever grabbing one.  A cloud looks like a real, very defined object from the ground, but if you have ever flown into a cloud you have experienced the reality that it is often VERY difficult, if not impossible, to tell where a cloud begins and ends.  Dreams are like that… they are pretty clouds.  They float n our minds-sky without any real definition or a plan to get there… and even if we did arrive at the cloud, the cloud is so ill-defined that we wouldn’t really be sure whether we had arrived or not.  Dreams, like clouds, condense out of the heating and cooling of our emotional passions.  They can be beautiful, but they can never be a destination. You can’t truely live in the clouds.

Dreams that you wake up from, and then formalize into a plan, become GOALS, and the journey to that goal, that one step at a time process, is what brings reality to our desires. Dreams are made real by waking and working. Dreams are made real by persistent, unrelenting action that follows a plan, that leads to well-defined places in the real world.  The sooner we wake to the realities of the world and realize that there are no benign fairies that will make magic happen, no genies granting wishes, and no living in the clouds, the sooner we will wake to a reality (that with with work and planning) CAN BE .

Now wake up… dreams are for sleeping 🙂