Dreams have no Witness

I woke up with a smile on my face. My wife asked me what had happened and I told her that I had a dream that I had sold 500,000 copies of my newest book – Mental Independence: An Innovators Guide to Transformational Thinking. She did not argue. She said in her simplistic way, ‘Amen’. I shared it with my team and they also believed. Now the truth is that no matter how much my wife trusts me or how much my team believes in me, they cannot independently verify that dream. They just have to take my word for it. Why? Because dreams have no witnesses. They are personal encounters fueled by personal convictions. Now my big issue today is this. If I like many people have no problem sharing a dream and I don’t need verification for a dream that I had while I was sleeping, why are so many people seeking verification for the dreams they have while awake?

This is the place where a lot of people have lost their dreams. it is the place where the dreams have been diluted and eventually abandoned. There are people today living reduced versions of their dreams because they sought verification and affirmation from people who no matter how much they try can never qualify as a witness to the dream. I remember seeing my daughters’ status on one of her social media platforms. It brought huge smile to my face. She wrote ‘You say I dream too big, I say you think too small’. When you subject your big dream to small thinkers do not expect anything big to come out of it. Besides, you then put the dream at risk. Never give your dream to people who can do nothing to take it forward for you.

The responsibility of making the dream a reality falls on the dreamer not on the hearer of the dream. If the hearers are part of the dream team, they must be inspired to imbibe and never assumed to imbibe the dream. The dreamer must build personal capacity for the dream. I once watched a documentary about some filthy rich engineer who loved cars so much and would take the engine of a Ferrari and put in a smaller bodied car. This smaller bodied car would then outperform all cars its size. The power is not in how cute it looks on the outside. The power is in the capacity.

Some people are more concerned about looking cute than building capacity. Cute is not what fulfills dreams. Capacity is what does. Sometimes capacity demands toughness. It means being ready to do the things you do not like doing (like reading more books) and to sometimes stop doing the things that you like doing (like having to sleep less).

Some people are not able to live their dreams because of fear. They have imagined everything that can go wrong and they then paralyzed and live in the fear of failure. If when watching television a program comes that you do not like, you simply change the channel. Our fears are programs that play through our mind. The good thing is that we have control over our minds. We can ‘change channels’. We need to give more airtime to our visions than to our fears. The more airtime we give to the vision the more options will begin to show up. Stagnation is a function of a mind that gave up.

Two very important questions you need to keep asking are, WHY and HOW. Every time you ask the question why you want your dream to succeed, your mind is forced to come up with reasons. These reasons become the motivation for the dream and the great thing about this is that motive has a way of overriding logic. All the excuses you can give will fade given the right motive. Asking HOW then forces your mind to come up with methodology.

Remember, at the end of the day the only person that you will be able to validly blame for the failure of your dream is yourself. Why? Because dreams have no witnesses.

Wale Akinyemi