Giving Up On My Dream, and the Power of Choice
I am sure you have big goals and dreams – things that you want to do in your life, maybe places you want to visit or a book you’d like to write. Hopefully, you’re also actively pursuing those dreams.
Some would say goals are a great motivator to act and can help us find happiness. Others would insist that they’re pointless – your happiness shouldn’t depend on achievements, and you should focus just on what you are doing, right here and now, instead of putting things off for some “other” life. As is often the case, the truth probably lies somewhere in between.
I’ve started trying to find that in-between by using my big goals as a way to set my direction. From time to time, I sit down and reexamine them. I use them to set the course, and then forget about them and focus on what I’m actually doing.
This mindset works for me, but for a long time, it wasn’t how I thought about my goals at all. In this article, I want to share my story of how I spent years pursuing my dream, and what I learned in the aftermath of succeeding, in the hopes that you might find something useful in the new mindset it helped me develop.
In short, here’s what happened: My dream was to be a startup founder. I worked towards it for years, until I finally started my own business. A couple of months in, I gave up. It turned out to be the best decision I never thought I’d make.
The Dream
During my last couple of years in high school, I got really into entrepreneurship and startups. I was inspired by books like Zero to One, by Peter Thiel, which to me seemed to open up an entirely new world of exciting ideas. (As a side note, Zero to One is a really interesting book with a lot of useful lessons, and I would recommend it even if you don’t care about being an entrepreneur yourself.)
I started talking to my friends about it, and we started sharing our excitement about entrepreneurship. That’s when a little thought formed in my head: “Hey! What if I became a founder? I’d love that!”.
So, I started steadily working towards my new-founded dream (no pun intended), and building up to that fateful day when I would achieve it.
Putting off your dreams, and the idea of the “fateful day”, is a whole other topic that we can talk about another time. I try to avoid this kind of thinking now, but during high school, I consistently put off actually doing anything serious on the pretense that I was a student and I wanted to focus on my studies and on getting into university.
I never lost sight of the dream, however. I kept reading. I started dabbling with some coding. I interned for a small software company. Flash forward to university. With much greater time, energy, and freedom, my efforts really exploded. I attended as many entrepreneurship and business talks and seminars as I could. I took part in a short-term student business project, which resulted in me landing an internship at a startup over the summer. I started getting close to some of the startups on-campus. I quickly became part of the student entrepreneurship society. I got onto its committee, and I’ve been helping people like myself take the first steps for the past two years.
Even though I wasn’t working on my own idea, meeting like-minded people whose experience I could learn from made a huge difference. As cheesy as it sounds, we only have so much time to live, learn, and collect experiences, so talking to others is like living another life through them – peeking into a whole new set of experiences that we might never encounter ourselves.
But let’s get back to the story. One of the people I got very close with over my time at university was my friend Sally. We’d worked on a couple of different projects together, so we knew we were a good team.
When she started her own small venture, she invited me on as her cofounder. I took a couple of days to get back to her, but in reality, I had made up my mind the second she’d asked.
That was it! That was the moment I’d been building towards for so long. I was a startup founder! It was a huge achievement and I was truly ecstatic… for a while.
The Reality
As I’m sure you can reflect on from your own experience, moments of great anticipation often bring about intense satisfaction, which is quickly replaced by the reality of the situation.
We spent the spring and summer of 2020 actively working on building up the business. We were both excited, we had a lot of ideas, and we were working hard. We managed to secure a little bit of funding and we got our first customers. All in all, things looked like they were going great.
However, I felt that something was wrong. I was putting in the hours, but the more work I did the less motivated I felt to keep going. I started losing the drive to put all of our cool ideas into practice. I realized that I just wasn’t passionate about what we were doing.
There’s a lot of talk within the entrepreneurship community about how starting your own business is really difficult and if you’re not passionate about what you are doing and truly believe in it, then you are unlikely to stick with it. I’d never realized just how true that was until I found myself in those shoes.
I wanted to be a founder, but very little about what we did actually inspired me. There I was, living (what I thought was) my dream, the thing I’ve been working on for years… and not really enjoying it. I felt so disillusioned that I started thinking: Is this what I want to be doing? Should I give up? Should I drop it? What a crazy idea!
Sally was an incredibly supporting cofounder, and most importantly a friend, and I knew she’d understand, so I wasn’t worried about that. I was more worried about going against my own dream. I realized I was driven more by that thought – I want to be a founder – than by actually wanting to be one. I’d constructed an identity around my dream, but when it came down to it I didn’t have that internal drive that I always thought I had.
This realization was a moment of tangible cognitive dissonance. I was confused – what had gone wrong? Perhaps I was too caught up in chasing my dream to stop and pay attention to how I felt about the whole thing. In any case, I knew I had to be honest with myself and with Sally. About 6 months into jumping on board, I decided to step down.
The Power of Choice
The whole thing sounds like a pretty bad experience, but it was far from it. I learned an incredible amount, and I do not regret it for a second.
At the same time, I’m glad I stepped down. It gave me an energizing sense of agency. I felt like I was in control of my own life, which is something I didn’t realize I was missing.
Up until then, I’d allowed myself to be dragged along by my “dream” instead of deciding what to do for myself. Many people seem to get caught up in their lives in this way, losing their own sense of agency. But what I now realize is that you always have the power of choice over your own life.
With this refreshing feeling, I started reevaluating other things that I thought I wanted. I was back on a path that I’d drifted from – being honest with myself about what I actually want to do. I cannot stress enough how important that is, and how much better I’ve felt since I made that decision.
I refocused my attention on my Computer Science degree, which made my last year at university incredibly fulfilling. For a while, I had known I enjoyed my studies, but I’d struggled to dedicate my time and attention to them. Being honest with myself helped me get past that barrier.
So…
So, do what makes you happy. A clichéd conclusion, I know, but it’s true. Ironically, a great way to figure out what makes you happy is to take a look at your dreams. What is it that you have always wanted to do? (Or at least think you do.)
Mine led me in the “wrong” direction, but I’m not saying you should ignore or lose sight of your dream. Quite the opposite – you should use them. Your dreams are great indicators of what you are passionate about. Just don’t let them carry you away. Use them, but don’t let them use you. Your dreams can serve as a compass, but you have the final say on which road you take.
This is how I think about my big goals now. Contrary to some advice you’ll find online, I am even a proponent of having very vague goals. If you’re using them as a compass, you don’t need them to be specific or S.M.A.R.T. Leaving them more open-ended prompts you to explore and lets you adapt them to your circumstances. I know I want to write, but I don’t know (or care) whether that means writing on Medium or publishing a book, writing fiction or non-fiction, etc. But since my goal is quite open, I will be achieving it no matter what I write and where I publish.
So, here I am, writing one of my first articles online.
I sincerely hope my story sparked some useful (or at the very least interesting) thoughts. I’d love to hear any of them, so feel free to leave a comment or get in touch.
