Mike Wazowski teaches us how to dream
Michael Wazowski was a precocious student with a straightforward dream: to become a top-notch full-time scarer for the greatest company in the monster world. Of course, as with any good Disney-Pixar protagonist, the deck was stacked against him from the start. Being a small, rotund and monocular monster, Mike was anything but scary. He was only smart, driven and hopeful. Normally these qualities are sufficient for any filmic protagonist to fulfill his or her dreams against all other odds. We’ve come to expect direct material success out of all smart, driven and hopeful people, particularly in the face of struggles on the silver screen.
But unlike most children’s movies, Monster’s University was not about how Mike overcame those obstacles to achieve his original goal. Instead, the movie showcased a delicate transformation in Mike — a transformation in which he learned to dream anew. Someone accustomed to the “dream-it-to-achieve-it” model of aspiration might be tempted to say that Mike settled for less than his dream, settled to be a scare assistant (a subordinate position) instead of a scarer (a glorified position). This would be wrong.
Mike did not choose something less than his dream, nor anything instead of his dream. Mike learned to magnify the dream itself and to dream better, and he can teach us to do the same.
Mike’s transformation can be divided into three shifts between two distinctive modes of dreaming:
- From a dream of ambition to a dream of passion
- From a dream of competition to a dream of collaboration
- From a dream of being to a dream of creation
Defining your dream: Ambition vs. Passion
Mike’s dream first develops during the opening scene of Monsters University in which Mike is on a school field trip to the scare factory of Monsters Inc. In bright-eyed wonder, Mike wanders into a human child’s room during a scare, successfully sneaking in and out without being caught. The scarer is reproachful but also impressed enough to give Mike his MU hat — a hat that comes to symbolize Mike’s very specific dream of entering Monsters University and ultimately working at Monsters Inc as a top scarer.
So, from the beginning Mike’s dream is defined by a context of superiority and comparative value judgments. Specifically, one of the conversations that Mike overhears at Monsters Inc. is between two scarers debating which of their schools is the best. This is hardly unique to Mike’s situation. It’s difficult to imagine a “dream” without it being tied closely to greatness, to superiority, to ambition.
But is that necessary? Can a dream be tied to anything except ambition?
Mike first learned to dream in a culture of ambition (and the modern education system is certainly that), but he re-learned to dream by accessing a culture of passion. The distinction: ambition is dreaming for your own sake, while passion is dreaming for the sake of something else. It boils down to the simple divide between love of self and love of the other.
Another important distinction between ambition and passion: following your passion is always possible; following your ambition often is not. To oversimplify, this is because only one person can be the best in a particular area, while almost everyone can contribute to the cause itself. Mike gets told over and over that he will never, ever be scary. And it’s true. But he can still invest his passion in the scaring industry, helping his society without demanding a place of glory for himself.
The distinction between ambition and passion should not lead to a do-what-you-love philosophy of careerism. Unlike most ambitions, passion can be expressed without reference to career identity and can be achieved in spite of being constricted to an unsavory job. So Mike, once he discovers his passion for scaring as a greater project, can actually do any job, even if it is only tangentially related to the act of scaring itself. Mike and Sully’s work in the mail room at Monsters Inc. can be viewed as part of their dream, not just a stepping stone toward it. This is encouraging to me, especially in a world where we tell people to do what they love—all while relying on jobs that no one can love.
Pursuing your dream: Competition vs. Collaboration
The way we define our dreams determines the way we act them out. As long as Mike acts under the assumption of personal ambition, he also acts solely as a competitor at Monster University, rather than a collaborator. This drives a wedge between him and those around him — particularly Sully — who are best equipped to help him find his true purpose in the scaring industry.
How often do we do the same? When we turn away from passion and toward ambitions, we create a zero-sum game of success and failure in our schools, careers, and private lives. Suddenly, the only thing that matters is whether we are better than those around us. We will tear others down, ironically, when we’re working towards an otherwise common goal.
Conversely, when we care about something beyond our own ambition, we find so many more reasons to work together. Mike’s earliest moment of collaborative, passion-based behavior lies in his advice to his roommate, Randall Boggs, about losing his glasses to look scarier. While Randy ends up becoming the very picture competition in Monsters Inc., this moment of generosity reveals what could have been a far more productive relationship.
The world of cutthroat capitalism elevates competition to the status of virtue. It seeps into every facet of our culture — even our relationships and our churches seem tinged with a need to be superior. If we keep it up for long, however, we learn that to follow the virtue of competitive ambition too far is to pursue a very lonely, isolated path cut off from the generative process of community and collaboration.
Fulfilling your dream: Being vs. Creation
These categories — defining, pursuing and fulfilling — are of course messy categories. There is no inherent truth to the divisions as such, which overlap and contradict themselves at times. I simply made them up. And because of this messiness, we must now return to that childhood process of defining our dreams on the front end, even as I talk about fulfilling them. Our dreams first take shape as dreams when our friends, teachers and family ask us a simple question:
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
What else can we ask a child about the future? The question seems inevitable, but only because we’ve asked this one habitually for decades. We could ask so many more, perhaps less insidious questions: What do you want to experience? What do you want to see? What do you want to know? What do you want to do? What do you want to create?
But instead, we are stuck with the original idea of being. We wrap up our dreams into a neat package of identity, one contingent on obtaining a title and nothing more.
The best dreams are never terminally achievable. Take my earliest childhood dream as an example: I wanted to work with animals. This could be defined in one of two ways: being a vet versus creating a better world for vulnerable creatures. I can be a vet — okay, I’m done. But I am never done serving the health of the animal kingdom. That well just won’t dry up.
Ambition leaves us feeling empty when we achieve it, always looking for a new ambition to replace the old. For this reason, fulfillment is not really a possible stage for ambition — one imagines Alexander the Great weeping that there is nothing left to conquer.
Instead of subsiding and leaving a feeling of emptiness, passion is constantly re-imagining ways to create within new contexts. Fulfillment might not be an all-at-once accomplishment at the end of a journey, but fulfillment is a real experience that passion accommodates along each step of the journey.
And so we see Mike follow this progression — from wanting to be a scarer to wanting to create a healthy community with his passions and contributions. That way, in Monsters Inc., when it becomes clear that their industry is based off of a crass manipulation of children, Mike is ready to change his entire way of life for the sake of something better. He is not stuck on the idea of scaring because he is free from the dream of being a scarer. No longer tied to the idea of a particular job, Mike is the only one fully prepared to run the industry off of laughter instead of screams.
Hopefully the children who grew up with Mike Wazowski were paying attention when he taught them how to dream. My hope is that the next generation is a little more free of the restrictive and ruthless nature of ambition, competition and being — that oppressive connection between career and identity. I, for one, will be advocating the life-saving possibilities of passion, collaboration and creation.
