Childhood Dreams

“Remember brick walls let us show our dedication. They are there to separate us from the people who don’t really want to achieve their childhood dreams.”

Randy Pausch was a professor at Carnegie Melon University. A few years ago he was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer and told he had three to six months to live. Over those months, there was much he had to do, including his famous Last Lecture. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s by far the most inspiring lecture I have ever heard and something I would recommend to everyone. There aren’t too many people who have to courage to face imminent death and do what he did, and he does it perfectly. I’m not going to go into his lecture, but I want to build on his main topic: childhood dreams.

When I was a kid, I loved to build things. I don’t know why I’m using the past tense—I still do—but I’ll get back to that later. For birthdays I would get huge K’nex sets and excitedly spent hours in my room building roller coasters and five-foot towers. My parents were probably worried their kid seemed to be on path to become a construction worker, but I loved (and still love) putting things together.

After watching “Titanic,” I spent a week putting together a model of the ship and hooking up a motor so it would actually move. I’d love to imagine navigating something that enormous, since when this happened around fifth grade, I really wanted to be a pilot.

Probably sometime in late middle school I decided a pilot’s lifestyle is not exactly feasible and probably not what I could do best. I shifted away from it. (But as I’m writing this right now, I still think it’d be really cool to pilot a 747.) So I shifted more toward entrepreneurship, and my new dream became something along the lines of, “I really want to make my own company and have it succeed.” Most of us grew up in the dot-com bubble, and some of the biggest companies of the day—like Google and Amazon—became what they are after starting up in garages. And that’s what I dreamed of doing, too.

There are a few patterns in the evolution of my childhood dreams. For one, I think they became more “practical,” at least in how we view it in society. I started out with a passion for building things and dreaming of becoming a construction worker—not exactly the most glamorous thing. I grew to want to be a pilot, which is more reasonable but still a bit out there. And today, I think I’m in a pretty large group of hopeful entrepreneurs.

Some might view that pattern of evolution as a good thing. I don’t. Childhood dreams are lofty, frequently unrealistic and difficult to achieve; they’re dreams. But that’s what makes childhood dreams great. The pattern I’ve noticed is dreams are so often reduced from idealistic hopes to watered down remnants that fit well within society.

I said earlier I still love to build things. The problem is there just isn’t the time. And I’d love to fly a 747, but there’s a huge sacrifice I would have to make to do that. I would essentially have to give up a lot of career options to focus on flying. And I still want to start up a business as much as I ever have. But where’s the time?

That’s the problem. It’s not that the childhood dreams go away, it’s that our time starts running out, and childhood dreams are often too risky to pursue.

So many of us will back out. We’ll give up on something we really wanted so we can do something safer, more secure and more certain.

If you told me the first business I start up will be successful, I would leave school and commit all my time to that. But I can’t get that guarantee, so it’s not that simple. I can’t just say, “Screw school, I’m going to move to California and hope my idea works!” I’ll try to do the best I can and still keep up in school, but again time is always an issue. Schoolwork, extracurriculars and such take up a lot of time. At the end of the day, there isn’t always enough left over to work on your childhood dreams.

This is when I think about Pauch’s quote. Growing up, time and reality—all of those could be seen as brick walls to childhood dreams. And to be fair, a lot of people will accomplish their childhood dreams of wanting to be a doctor or engineer or economist. But for those who don’t have dreams that fit in so nicely with the college curriculum and life style, there are a lot of obstacles. And when that happens, it’s easy to lose focus.

So what I really want to say is, don’t lose that focus. And that’s not some preachy statement because it applies to me just as much. College is a great place and a fantastic experience, but if you come out of it having lost the childhood dreams that initially were sources of motivation—I don’t know if I can call that a good four years.

College isn’t worth the sacrifice of losing childhood dreams, and childhood dreams often don’t get the respect they deserve. Some of the adults I admire the most are the ones who still have the childish ideology, that mentality of, “I don’t care if it’s difficult or unrealistic. I’m going to do it.”

Childhood dreams are what really make us who we are. They’re the things that give us uniqueness and show what we really want to do. And they’re things that are too often lost at the expense of a more standard, typical reality. It’s great to grow up and learn more—I truly don’t see myself as a construction worker anymore—but growing up doesn’t have come at the cost of losing who we really are.