59. Dreams & Regret
3 quotes about finding a way to link dreams to reality.
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
(Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
When the imagination and will power are in conflict, are antagonistic, it is always the imagination which wins, without any exception.
(Emile Coue)
But if you can vividly imagine your future under different scenarios, you’ll make hard choices today that will, you hope, get you to the future you imagine and want. I can imagine the future so vividly that I was planning my retirement before I was out of grade school. That’s literally true. Thanks to my clearly imagined future it seemed easy to modify what I was doing on any given day to make my dreams come true in the future.
(Scott Adams)
Connecting our goals with our deepest desires enables us to have the driving force to achieve them but it is also important to realize what we could end up regretting.
Regrets of the Dying
- I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
- I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
- I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
- I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
- I wish that I had let myself be happier.
(Bronnie Ware)
A good question to link both, our desires and regrets, is what is the intersection of what you would do if you had 6 months to live and if you had a billion dollars?