When do we know that our dreams are not just ambitions – some ideas which were put on us by society, family etc. Where is that borderline of doing thing to please others, or doing something to fulfill our destiny? Because I would even say that the recognition I get from others is what most motivates me.
Dear Inga,
As king Solomon wrote “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!” So there’s nothing wrong in seeking recognition – because either way all is the consequence of our ego (be it good or bad).
The borderline though between society’s dream and yours is to be found within yourself. Other’s cheers and encouragements are to be seen as a consequence of your actions, not as the cause. Would you stop doing something that you love, simply because you lose an audience?
Others cheers are of course a balm but you equally need to have the courage to persist in your dream despite the challenges.
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
You are your own best audience.
Dear all,
Q)When do we know that our dreams are not just ambitions – some ideas which were put on us by society, family etc. Where is that borderline of doing thing to please others, or doing something to fulfill our destiny? Because I would even say that the recognition I get from others is what most motivates me.
A)Dreams are far greater than ambitions and you will know when you want to know. that means, you before asking this question think carefully about your own dreams and your own ambitions, ask yourself what is the difference between these two terms in your life. what makes them unique from each other.
let me give you one example, there was a poor child in the village. he was only single child of his parents and both his father and mother were blind. The society, told the poor child.., leave the parents since they bold are blind and they will not look after you so you have to look after yourself, go to city and earn money, establish yourself etc etc.., the child was sad.., one night he started to think, he asked himself, “What is the true virtue of my existence?” When I was born, my both parents were blind and despite being blind they took care of me, they made me adult now..,
I am sorry, I have to stop here in the middle..
God bless you all !
Thank you very much for the comments – very inspiring!
The poem is fantastic, B*Sofie!
xx
Inga
The .. Magus’ words above are ..pure Wisdom.
Thank you, Paulo Coelho.
LOVE,
Thelma.
B. Sofie, how you did that? You pretty inspired. I like the lines.Thanks
Even the harshest of criticism and conflict didn’t stop me reaching a particular dream ..When you begin to fulfil your destiny and the happiness and joy this brings , will motivate you more than the recognition of others.Inga,thanks for the interesting question and Paulos’ eloquent reply.
Breda
we do things- we give and by giving we have to know also how to take- not only in the satisfaction also in recognition- i find recognition is a kind of award- a thanks- an admiration- kind of feeling to one- and so much more and i think its really important!! in life the knowing of this kind of giving- geting way!
B*Sofie,
Nice poem,,,
God bless you all !
Hi Inga, what a wonderful and valid question. The beauty of Paulo`s blog is that all of us get an opportunity to offer our thoughts on any given subject. I believe the easiest way to tell our own dreams from dreams others place upon us, is once again the feeling we get inside when we are connected to our dreams, is completely different to the feeling we get from dreams placed upon us. One is positive one is negative.
When I find myself occupied with something -
not being aware of the time & day
I know I`m at the right spot;
Feeling eager, enthustiastic & joyful -
even in the midst of soltitude
When “the dream” is motivated through society,
friends & family –
the peaceful & continuing feeling of joy
often disapear rather quickly
So then;
Close your eyes – take a deep breath
stretch your wings
and fly into the dream of your heart*
Is not very easy, and younger the person more difficult to do something against family or friends will. I had bad experience in my youth, I always loved sports and movement, action. Just one example. My best friend from school wanted to go for ballet school, and as happens often, she wanted I come with her. I told her must ask father opinion, but to come her with me ,so maybe he will be milder. Poor girl, trying to convince my father, no ways. He even said I was too fat for the ballet, but I was just a normal weight. For being sure, me and my friend went to talk to the teacher of ballet, and I asked her if I was too fat for that. Teacher said no, no. How I think such?
But even than my father wont change mind. Well, one can imagine that at 18 ,when I was grown up and can do as I wish, after the law, is not the same as if I could do the ballet course at 9.
I agree that now is very hard that somebody stop me with talk, or on arguments as “What would our neighbor say? What would our father think?” .If I want a thing and I know my mom,that I love most, disagrees, I just dont tell her, but I do my own way.Because is my life, I feel bad or well, not others.But I know many many persons that at the slightest hint to stop from the family, or priests, they just obey.Depends on the personality.
Dear all,
Q)When do we know that our dreams are not just ambitions – some ideas which were put on us by society, family etc. Where is that borderline of doing thing to please others, or doing something to fulfill our destiny? Because I would even say that the recognition I get from others is what most motivates me.
A)Dreams are far greater than ambitions and you will know when you want to know. that means, you before asking this question think carefully about your own dreams and your own ambitions, ask yourself what is the difference between these two terms in your life. what makes them unique from each other.
let me give you one example, there was a poor child in the village. he was only single child of his parents and both his father and mother were blind. The society, told the poor child.., leave the parents since they bold are blind and they will not look after you so you have to look after yourself, go to city and earn money, establish yourself etc etc.., the child was sad.., one night he started to think, he asked himself, “What is the true virtue of my existence?” When I was born, my both parents were blind and despite being blind they took care of me, they made me adult now..,
I am sorry, I have to stop here in the middle..
God bless you all !
“would you stop doing something that you love just because you lost the audience?”AH NO WAY!!!
I was like that at first too now I don’t give a damn at all,like you say “you write for yourself first” then people might like it or not,whatever.This has nothing to do with what you do.Your ideas,all the treasures you hold inside,is yours.Don’t stop singing,dancing,writing ect people..just because other people don’t like it or try to stop you from doing it.Do what your heart feels like to do.I think you have learnt with Paulo’s words here,by coming here day after day for a while,even though you knew it all inside of yourself all along.I did,at least it did remind me so.Thank you ;)
We all, I suppose, have a certain need to reap the approval of others – it seems only human nature. But I also think that an excessive need for approval is something that can be learned in childhood, something that we pick up according to the way our parents and others treat us when we are growing up. I have thought a lot about this, because, at certain point in my own life I realized that my “need to please” others had grown so out of control that it was actually a detriment to my well-being.
It is rather difficult to explain, but it had to do with a certain mutability that seemed to be a part of my personality – often I would refer to myself as “the chameleon” because this is what I resembled. No matter what environment I found myself in, or what people I found myself surrounded by, I changed who I was and what I was about to fit the tastes and norms and expectations of those with whom I came in contact. This did not happen instantaneously – my reaction to external pressures was slow, bringing about gradual shifts in my personality, but the changes occurred, nonetheless, and this began to irritate me greatly. The reason it would irritate me is that I would wake up one day and realize that I had drifted far from my real values, far from the things that really mattered to me in life – I would be living someone else’s idea of what life was all about.
For example, I would start dating someone, and slowly, over time, whatever of myself did not seem to fit into that relationship would simply drop away and disappear from sight. If I had desires that this other person didn’t share, or aspirations that they did not necessarily approve of or praise audibly enough, I would slowly sublimate those desires and cease to pursue the fulfillment of those aspirations.
This would happen to me in college as well. Given the option of several projects to work on, or similarly, several subjects to write about, I would always choose the one that seemed to elicit the most enthusiasm from my professors, not necessarily the one that I was most enthusiastic about. It was a matter of “working them” to get a response. If praise followed, I was happy. If I got an excellent grade, but no accompanying verbal or written praise, I was not satisfied. So, necessarily, the angle that I would take on a project, or the way that I would write about a topic would essentially be shaped by what I thought would “please” the professor who would be judging the work.
In my life as a whole, my personality became like this big bag of tricks and potions. I became like the traveling charlatan selling wares from out of the back of his wagon. I would stand up on my little box, in the middle of the crowd, and yell, “Hey, who’ll have a little of this?” If no one responded, I would stick that part of myself back in the bag, saving it for the next town, for another crowd, and I would pull out something else. And I would keep on doing this until I found the parts of me that pleased my audience. Then that would be “me” for that time and place.
I remember one time – this is just one small example – I was taking a daily yoga class with an instructor whom I highly admired, in other words, a person whom I had classified in my own mind as an “authority figure.” At the same time, I was enrolled in a university course in Chinese and Japanese history, a course which, upon enrollment, I had been very eager to take. Well, one day I missed my yoga class, and the next day my instructor confronted me and asked me why. I explained that I had needed to study for an exam in Chinese and Japanese history. He guffawed and made some comment to the effect of What did I think I was doing! Chinese and Japanese history! How ridiculous to waste my time on such a thing! Did I really believe that true wisdom came from books? Books about history?! I was crushed. This “authority figure” whom I greatly admired did not approve at all of my efforts to learn more about the history of the East. It was foolishness to him. The next week, I didn’t go to history class, nor the week after. In fact, I didn’t return to class for the whole of the semester. I simply dropped out. It was too late to officially withdraw, and so I got an “incomplete” on my transcript, and the next year, had to repeat the entire history course all over again. All of this because I so badly wanted to please this “authority figure” whom I had set up as worthy of judging which endeavors in my life were “worth while” and which were not.
If I had it all to do over again, I would argue with him, not in a mean or harsh way, but I would stand my ground and speak my peace. I would explain to him what that class meant to me, how important I felt it was for ME to learn about Chinese and Japanese history, and I would emphasize the fact that, in my life, despite how he might feel about it, that history course was every bit as important to me as his yoga class. This would not please him one bit, I am certain. But today I am not so concerned with pleasing others as I am with pleasing myself. Although I used to do it all the time, I am no longer willing to conform my life to fit someone else’s concept of what my life should be all about.
This excessive “need to please,” I honestly think, is something that I learned in childhood. And I do not say this in any way to blame my parents or to suggest that they did something “wrong” in raising me. I think it happened quite accidentally, a combination of my environment and the personality I was born with. When I was young, we lived on a ranch, very isolated from other people. Until I started school at the age of seven, I very seldom saw other children, except maybe once a week, for a few hours. My parents and all the hired help that worked on the ranch were always very busy, from daylight till dark, tending to horses and cattle, building barns, mending fences – all the normal things that occur on a ranch on a daily basis. I was left to myself mostly, with my animals: my horse, my dog, my goat, my pigs, etc. My parents did not “neglect” me in any way – these were just facts of life, the ordinary conditions of the environment in which I was raised. I think – this is what I have concluded in adulthood anyway – that I learned, at a very early age, that to get the attention of adults (“authority figures”), I had to be sly and even somewhat manipulative: I had to watch them and figure out what THEIR interest were, learn what THEY were enthusiastic about and what excited them. Then, if I engaged in one of these activities and I did it well: Wallah! They were pleased – I got attention. I got approval. I got what I wanted.
In looking back, I think the culmination of this ridiculousness occurred when I was around thirteen and undertook to learn trick-riding. (Yes, the kind you see in the circus: crawling under the horses belly while he’s at a full gallop, or standing on his back, jumping through flaming hoops, etc.) My mother had been a well known trick rider on the rodeo circuit when she was younger, and it pleased her well when I expressed a willingness to learn this art from her. The whole thing was a disaster! I remember it well – I so wanted to please her, to make her proud of me. I loved to ride, I had ridden horses since the age of two, when I was barely old enough to stay in the saddle without falling off. But my mother was a natural born dare-devil. When it came to horses, as well as to speed, there was not a fearful bone in her body. This sort of heart simply was not in me. There was nothing that I wanted to do less than to fling my body off the saddle of a galloping horse. But there I was, trying to do it – to please her.
One of the first tricks that I was to learn involves hooking your ankles into a couple of loops at the back of the saddle and then falling backward off of the horse and letting your fingertips trail the ground right behind the horse’s hooves. There is no way to accomplish this feat but at a fast gallop, because otherwise, the horse’s hocks knock you in the back of the head. The horse has to be traveling fast enough so that the momentum will cause your body to tail out far enough behind the horse to clear his legs and feet. In other words, it’s a trick that you either do – all at once, completely – or you don’t. There is no way to “ease into it.” It requires flinging your whole body backwards, all at once, off the back of a speeding horse. Try as I might, I could not make myself do it.
There is another, similar trick that requires you to hold the saddle horn and jump off the side of the horse. When your feet hit the ground, you use the momentum to vault back up and over the saddle to land on the other side of the horse – back and forth you vault, from side to side. Because the momentum required to execute the vault is great, the horse must be at a head-long run, moving extremely fast. There is no way to practice the trick, first, at a slow pace. Same thing – I couldn’t do it. Nothing was stopping me but my own primal sense of self-preservation: I did not want to die! Some people, like my mother, are born to be trick riders – the thing came so naturally to her – others are simply born to ride, to sit in the saddle and aspire to keep their backside firmly planted there. I was of the latter persuasion. My body was not meant to be flung from a galloping horse, at least not intentionally!
My mother was very displeased. I was even more displeased with myself. I so wanted her approval, I so wanted to excel at the thing which she deemed as an admirable and praiseworthy profession. But it just wasn’t going to happen. For years I criticized myself for that “failure,” until one day I finally realized, Hey! I never really wanted to be a trick-rider to begin with. It was all just to please her. It wasn’t my path in life, wasn’t even something that I truly desired. When I look back upon it now, I just think of it as one of those instances in life where we do absolutely the most foolish things on earth simply in an effort to elicit the approval of others.
At this point in life, I try very hard to just please myself. That alone is hard enough. I don’t need the addition of anyone else’s concepts of what my life should be all about.
Thank you, Inga, for offering us all this question to ponder. And I wish you the very best in finding that borderline you seek.
Sincerely,
And with much love,
Savita