Did the Quote, “Go Confidently in the Direction of Your Dreams” Become Misconstrued?

Like many people, I read the motivational quote, “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams” by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and believed that his advice held the knowledge to help me achieve anything.

As a risk taker, a dream achiever, I put this quote next to my list of dreams as I actively pursued a life going from one magnificent experience to the next. The quote served me well, as I charged my desires. That was until the dreams became harder.

For instance, when I wanted to do a double jump in figure skating, get into a big wave in white water kayaking, or create a new company with my brand, I thought by going confidently in the direction of my dreams, I’d be able to achieve my goals.

What the quote didn’t explain was how to maintain that confidence when I fell 1000 times and fractured my lower back, or when I got tossed by a big wave and hit my head on a rock that cracked open my helmet. It didn’t tell me how to keep going when I trusted the wrong people in business and was crushed.

The hard hits rocked my confidence and instead of being able to charge, fear became my way of life. No matter how many times I tried to self-talk my way into freedom from uncertainty, I couldn’t overcome being paralyzed by past failure and pain.

Ultimately, in skating I stopped doing the double jumps, deciding it wasn’t worth the injuries. I stopped kayaking. In business, I gave up and walked away, letting go and letting failure break me. I told myself I could be happy without ever reaching these goals.

The dreams refused to die. My coach suggested I try again at the jumps, because she could see them in my skating. Each time I looked at my white water kayak I missed being out on the river splashing through waves. My business haunted my sleep.

But how do you find the confidence to go confidently in the direction of your dreams when you feel that you were broken?

I looked up the quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

As I read his words, I realized that the quote I put on my refrigerator had been taken out of context. It isn’t about going confidently in the direction of your dreams, but about living a life where you let those dreams guide you allowing life to open up in majestic ways. The quote isn’t about achievement, it’s about understanding the universal law of living. Nowhere does it say that you will have all the confidence to complete your dreams, instead it states that you must build the foundations in order to create castles.

It’s stating that if you take the journey you will recognize many aspects of living that will free you from society’s constraints and limitations.

Never does he actually say, you will achieve the dreams, but instead discusses living a life that you have imagined that’s all your own.

The more I’ve read the full quote, and stepped out from behind the stories of my so-called failures, the more I understood that we don’t start off being confident in going after our dreams, and if we do, that confidence will be shaken and torn down.

Instead, it’s the journey of those dreams; the strengths we find within the falls that build up our confidence, so that with each step we take, each time we get up, the more we walk through those hard moments, we will come upon an uncommon success. That success isn’t the goal that we’ve achieved, but that we’ve found a freedom to simply live and experience for the sake of having this magnificent gift of life.

In our success and goal-oriented culture, we’ve taken these spiritual words and used them as a motivational quote to achieve. That need creates a deep fear of failure that stops us from ever trying to go after what we most deeply desire.

Yet, if we read the entire quote, and don’t take it out of context, it’s a spiritual journey that celebrates the lack of confidence when we begin, and the shining freedom that going towards our dreams creates as it builds our confidence.

We don’t go confidently in the direction of our dreams. We go fearful, terrified, unknowing, but we go towards them because they build a life of majesty that awaits us.