Everyone has a dream. Or if you had one, then it’s probably still buried somewhere very, very deep within you. It’s the thing you would do if you had all the money in the world, probably.

Achieving your dream would make you happy — I think most of us would agree on this point. The thing is, achieving your dream is no cake walk. Happiness isn’t a joyride. It’s hard work. It’s much more work than most of us are willing to bear, and it’s unexpectedly rough too.

If you have a dream, and if you’ve ever started to act on it or you’re still acting on it, you’ll know that it’s really, really difficult to be a dreamer. Especially if, like me, you were born and bred in a world of realists.

I come from the (currently) world’s 9th most expensive city to live in. Here, hardly anyone has unorthodox dreams like “I want to be a yogi” or “I want to be an artist”, because dreams like that don’t pay the bills. Most people bury any un-lucrative dreams they may have and settle for realistic, secure, paying jobs instead. And it comes easily too — from the time we start pre-schooling, we’re constantly inundated with messages that we should all be professional employees because that’s where the money is.

So everytime we start to dream, our “realist” training kicks in. At first we’re told to put our dreams aside — “Drawing is fun, but now it’s time to do real work”; “Being a musician is great, but you have to be really, really, really good to survive”. Then as we grow older, we learn to tell ourselves to put our dreams aside so we don’t have to hear other people say it. Our dreams become mere hobbies, self-amusements, interests. All the lofty ambitions we once harboured get squashed under our fears of never being able to earn enough money, getting crushed by bills, and failing to live up to the expectations of the people we love.

Dreaming and being realistic are both like muscles. The one you use regularly is the one that gets stronger. Most of us have really weak dream muscles — I know I sure do. I’m great at getting excited about doing whatever I want to do in the world, but just throw a little pebble onto my smooth red carpet and I go crazy building the pebble up into a rock and before you know it, I’m running away from the big, bad, boulder.

The thing is — and I think it’s really important that this is out there in the world — we need to take care of our dreams. There are enough people out there who are more than happy to kill our dreams for us. Some of them do it in the name of love (“If you carry on down this path you will fail and suffer”), some of them do it with malice (“You’re just too incompetent to get there”), and some of them do it out of jealousy (“I failed before at the same thing, what makes you think you will succeed?”).

Instead of allowing ourselves to kill our dreams, we should be protecting them at least, from ourselves.

“When we renounce our dreams and find peace, we go through a short period of tranquility. But the dead dreams begin to rot within us and to infect our entire being… And one day, the dead, spoiled dreams make it difficult to breathe, and we actually seek death…that frees us from our certainties, from our work, and from that terrible peace of our Sunday afternoons.” — Paulo Coelho.

When asked what’s most important in life a common answer is “to be happy”, yet so few of us have the courage to commit to doing what it takes to really be happy. We reduce our ambitions to what’s “realistic”, and tell ourselves that what makes us happy really is to make everyone else happy so that we feel like our sacrifice is justifiable. We tell ourselves that we’ll be happy when we find contentment in where we are at right now so we don’t have to work so hard to get to where we honestly wanted to be.

We find reasons to be happy with the status quo so that we don’t have to face the truth that we are, in fact, dissatisfied because we do not feel that the status quo is acceptable to us. We used to aspire to something greater, but somehow, somewhy, we have compromised on our standards and expectations to settle for something less that doesn’t really make us happy, but will kind of suffice for now, and we try our darndest to be satisfied with it.

Here is a hard truth: happiness is very, very hard work.

It’s waking up every morning, telling yourself that no matter what else you have to do at work, for your family, or with your friends, you also need to find and devote time to reaching your dream. It’s being your own cheerleader — giving yourself pep talks when the rest of the world rejects you and when your place in the world seems to be behind a desk in a cubicle you share with four other people and no pantry. It’s finding a way to convince yourself that it’s worth it to put yourself out there and put in all that effort for the possibility of getting nothing in return, and believe me, that is much, much harder than it is to convince yourself that you’re happy with your status quo.

But we need dreamers. The world needs dreamers.

Throughout history, society has advanced solely because there have existed dreamers. People who recognised that the status quo was inadequate and sought repeatedly to improve or change it. They tried again, and again, and again, and again, failing hundreds and thousands of times, they took months, years, decades to perfect solutions to a problem they saw before everyone else. They forged ahead despite the discouragement of the people around them; people who had convinced themselves that they were satisfied and happy with the status quo. They didn’t allow themselves to kill their own dreams, and they didn’t allow anyone else either.

The world was not shaped by conformists; people who are only capable of fitting into the world as it currently exists. The world has been shaped by inventors, innovators, disrupters, rebels, and revolutionaries. Without these defiant dreamers, we would still be lighting our homes by the gas of a lantern and scribbling our thoughts on pieces of papyrus. The world needs dreamers.