Pursuing your dreams is more important than accomplishing them

A lesson learnt from the Last Lecture

I am reading the Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. It has some great insights about the importance of pursuing your childhood dreams. In the book, Randy talks about his childhood dream of becoming an NFL player. Though he could not accomplish that dream, he got more from pursuing that dream, than he did from many of the ones he did accomplish.

The lessons he learnt from his football coach like teamwork, perseverance and sportsmanship stayed with him throughout his life and helped him to become better in a lot of other areas. I have seen a lot of people cribbing about how it’s so hard to accomplish a dream. We take a start towards our dreams but then stop in the middle because of the difficulties involved.

The problem is that we only have the end in mind. We do not value the process and the journey that will take us towards our dream. When we cannot see the end in sight, we lose our motivation and give up on our dream. We fear of failures and are afraid of getting judged by others.

Giving up on a dream is easy but the regret it brings in the later years of life can be pretty hard to face for a lot of people. When we start embracing the journey and the lessons learnt from following our dreams, it becomes much easier to work our way towards their accomplishment. Even if the dream is not accomplished, the experiences and lessons stay with us throughout our life.