Making a difference in the world is probably somewhere near the top of everyone’s bucket list. According to Dr. Karl Albrecht, we have five ingrained fears, and two of them, fear of separation and fear of ego-death, demonstrate that we naturally crave to have a purpose, meaning, and to feel like we are of great value. In essence, this suggests that we have an innate desire to want to be difference-makers as a way of expressing self-worth.
Being able to make a difference, however, does require effort. We must not only figure out what we want to do with our lives, but we must also figure out what it’s going to take for us to achieve these things. Thomas Edison is a great role model when it comes to wanting to make a difference.
What is very captivating about Edison is found within his journey in creating electrical light. Edison’s dream of creating electrical light was believed to be way out in “la-la land“. According to critics, Edison was sabotaged for thinking that his ideas were even possible. But, despite Edison’s dream being considered unrealistic back in his day and him creating about 1,000 failed attempts, he was still able to pull it off!
Edison established a very powerful mindset that if adopted, not only would it leverage us to be able to live out our dreams, if everyone adopted it, humanity would completely change for the better! Looking back at the historical facts of the amount of sabotage and failed attempts Edison experienced during his journey in creating his invention, his mindset had to have been somewhere along the lines of one, to dream big, and two, understanding the path it would take to achieve it.
This very inspiring and powerful mindset combination that Edison must have implemented is what I like to call:
“Having UNREALISTIC dreams, with REALISTIC expectations.”
Thomas Edison showed that he believed it was appropriate to have the unrealistic dream of creating the world’s first electric light, while simultaneously demonstrating he had the realistic expectation that the dream will most likely take a lot of time, trial, and error to accomplish. Looking into this mindset combo even further, things start to make sense as to why Edison would have needed to implement BOTH mindsets working together to be able to make the difference he wanted to make.
The Vitality Of This Mindset Combination
Edison’s dream of creating electrical lighting was great, but his dream would have been bound for defeat if he didn’t have the realistic expectation that his dream would take a lot of time, trial, and error. If he didn’t have this expectation, he would have given up when his experiments started to consistently fail, thinking it actually isn’t possible. Likewise, Edison’s expectations were great, but if his expectations lacked the driving force of fulfilling his unrealistic dream in creating electric light, electric lighting wouldn’t even exist in the first place!
It was necessary that Edison had to intertwine both mindsets to make the difference he wanted to make. This mindset combination helped enable Edison to focus on his dream and prevent the struggle of numerous failed attempts, as well as sabotage from his peers, from causing him to quit.
The Benefit Of Each Mentality And The Overall Mindset
1.) Unrealistic Dreams Are What Change The World!
Unrealistic dreams are essential to the world’s progression. In order for a person to change the world and how it works, one must have an unrealistic vision of what the world is not currently like, and then decide what they are going to do to change it into what they vision it to be. In Edison’s case, he witnessed a world without effective lighting and he had a vision to change that. As a result, his vision allowed humanity to experience the renovation of better lighting – electrical lighting!
Without Edison’s unrealistic dream, the world would have remained the same. Without any unrealistic dreams, the world would always stay the same. Going throughout life only focusing on doing things that involve what is real in the current present moment; nothing would ever change.
The lack of unrealistic dreams would not only cause the world to have never experienced Edison’s electrical lighting, the world we live in wouldn’t have cars, planes, medicine, navigation systems, better communication, computers, the internet, cell phones, etc. The list goes on and on! If it weren’t for unrealistic dreams, all of the most useful product creations we use today would not exist!
What This Mentality Would Mean For Us
Due to the amazing results that unrealistic dreaming brings forth, it makes zero sense for anyone of us to believe that something can’t be done just because it doesn’t exist at the moment. This goes for anything, whether it is wanting to start a business, to get a dream job, create something, anything!
Tony Robbins puts it well. He mentioned in one of his interviews that, “Impossible isn’t a fact, it’s an opinion…How many times has science showed something is impossible, now science shows is possible? Things are impossible until somebody does it.” Just think about and research all the things that people, and even science used to say were impossible, but are now possible. This transition is all thanks to people who weren’t afraid to dream big! No matter what people thought!
Self Application
This leads to a very critical point in how it’s vital to know that when someone tries to talk down your dream(s), that that kind of behavior has been PROVEN to be nothing but ignorance. Let it be known that the products that down talkers see and use were once unrealistic, but are now realistic thanks to the unrealistic dreams of the people who envisioned them to happen!
2.) Realistic Expectations Don’t Lead A Person To Disappointment, But Rather Establishes Why There Is No Valid Reason To Give Up When Results Don’t Show
When someone is in the process of going after their dream, having the wrong expectation automatically sets them up to be in a very emotionally difficult state to work with when a failure occurs. With the wrong expectation, encountering even a little bit of failure turns the expectation of thinking it was going to work into disappointment, discouragement, and self-doubt. Not being real with expectations, in essence, implants multiple pieces of false evidence in the person’s mind to believe that what they are trying to accomplish is not going to work.
Having the wrong expectation is utterly a vicious trap. It places a person on a path that one, ultimately leads to a point of giving up, and two, has a way of making a person want to quit even faster just from experiencing a little more failure. Edison was able to avoid this trap because he concentrated on being real with himself. He made sure to understand that completing his dream was going to be a very long process that would involve a lot of trial and error. He demonstrated this by not letting the countless and countless failed experiments affect him to the point of deciding to quit. And we are talking about roughly 1,000 failed attempts!
According to the societal way of thinking, consistently failing means it doesn’t work and that you should stop. So, basing Edison’s failures on what society thinks, he had more than enough reasons to quit, and yet he didn’t! Edison’s expectation told him there was no valid reason to quit, which pushed him through the failures and allowed him to be able to fulfill his dream.
In contrast to Edison, trying to achieve a dream by falsely assuming that a task is supposed to be easy, practically instantaneous, and require little effort when in reality it doesn’t, puts that dream in jeopardy. All it takes is a piece of failure to occur when it was believed it was going to work, to implant doubt and create the vicious trap of desperately wanting to quit. That is why it is so important to be realistic when it comes to expectations.
What This Mentality Would Mean For Us
When going into the process of pursuing a dream or even a project, it can be good to think about things such as, how long it will most likely take, and how much extensive amount of trial and error its going to require to achieve to find that realist path. With this mentality, instead of getting disappointed with failure thinking it shouldn’t have occurred, we are given valid reason and massive amounts of encouragement to continue on.
Self-Application
It is realistic expectations that help us and everyone to push through the tough times that come with failure. It is realistic expectations that takes failure and turns it into a path that is closer to succeeding. It is realistic expectations that remind us that even when the desired results don’t show, there is no valid reason to give up. As a result, instead of having our dreams die because of failure, it survives for the better! So before you face failure again, think about what it will actually take to accomplish what it is you are striving for. By having realistic expectations, you allow yourself to combat failure when it comes, instead of having it cause you to want to quit. This will give you tremendous protection against failure that every dream needs. So, it is vital to make sure you really hone in on the importance, vitality, and extreme benefit of this.
3. Combining Unrealistic Dreams With Realistic Expectations Can Only Be Beneficial Towards A Person’s True Desires That They Want In Life
Taking these two mindsets into action will be insane leverage for people who use it when working to make the differences they want in life. Together, these mindsets don’t give up on a person and what they truly want for themselves, but only fuel people with confidence, hope, purpose, while providing a realistic path of true guidance for us to follow to live out our dreams. With unrealistic dreams, a person’s dream to do what they want to do in life is never forgotten or ignored, only approached. And with realistic exceptions alongside, a person’s dream is not given a false sense of direction, but only the path to flourishing.
Conclusion
There are very strong reasons why having unrealistic dreams with realistic expectations can be a complete life changer for anyone who follows it. When applied, it shows the person that they can achieve anything they want for themselves and lets them know they can be certain that they are being guided on the right path that doesn’t tear their dreams down, but leverages and lifts it up instead.
Even if you are like me and tend to think to yourself, “How do I know if it’s actually going to work, and if it’s possible that I can fulfill my dream?”, it is always helpful to remember to look back at the fact that achieving the unrealistic is attainable. It’s been done countless and countless times.
If you’re at a point where you’ve given up on a dream, are on the fence about doing so, or think you probably will in the future, all I want to say to you is I totally get where you are coming from. I get that it gets extremely difficult to achieve something that requires a lot of time, effort, and trial and error to figure out. I and everyone who wants to make a difference in life, all have to go through the same type of journey. So just remember that you have support, that you are not alone with this!
One piece of advice I learned that I want to share with you that completely changed my life for the better was realizing that it is more painful to give up on your dream than it is to continue with your dream when you don’t feel like it.
Just hink about it…
Yes, it can be painful to work on achieving something hard, especially when things aren’t going well, but giving up on a dream means we have to live with the pain of lack of fulfillment every single day. Although things may still look good on the outside, we would still be dead on the inside knowing that we gave up on ourselves and what we want in life.
This pain then leads to an even greater pain of being too old to have the energy to live the way you want to live. Your dreams become nothing but a way of taunting you. At this moment, you have to live with the pain of regret where you can’t do anything to live with the changes and the effects you wanted to leave on this planet. You have to live the rest of your life knowing you have officially chosen to give up on yourself, and now have to suffer thinking about your dreams, while being completely powerless to do anything to make them come true. THAT is what you call pain – where you know you want something, but you can’t do anything about it to get it.
Learning this made me become too scared to experience this. Now, I live life knowing that even if I continue through the pain and difficulty of pursuing my dreams and I don’t reach them, I still don’t have to live with the BRUTAL pain of regret knowing that I did everything I could to succeed.
I hope you enjoyed reading this and that this post inspired you in some way! Feel free to comment what you thought about this and if you have questions feel free to ask!
Until next time!