Dealing With the Emotional Turmoil of Pursuing Your Dreams

Over the past year thousands of people created business, received promotions, and seemingly achieved long-term goals during a global pandemic. Pursuing and achieving your dreams at any time can be extremely draining. Michael F. Schein discusses how to deal with the emotions that come along with creating your “best life”. View the article in its entirety using the link below.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-anatomy-hype/202109/dealing-the-emotional-turmoil-pursuing-your-dreams

According to countless personal development gurus, the key to achieving your dreams is having a laser focus on a single goal.

The problem is that most people who follow this advice end up frustrated, burnt out, and stuck.

In her new book, The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World, Dorie Clark offers a refreshing alternative perspective. As she sees it, the real path to achieving success (and maintaining your sanity in the process) is to embrace an approach characterized by openness and experimentation.

I’ve long been a fan of Dorie Clark’s work, and it was a thrill to be able to talk with her about the ideas covered in The Long Game.

Michael Schein: What would you tell people who are struggling with the emotional toll of pursuing their dreams in a world filled with real-life responsibilities?

Dorie Clark: Of course, you have your present reality, and it’s important to take care of that. At the same time, if you can devote 20% of your time to something you’re deeply interested in, it’s incredible what that can result in. Google has their 20% time policy. People can gain a lot by doing this in their own lives. If you’re not crazy about where you are right now, consistently spend little bits of time on other things over a long enough time horizon, and you'll eventually get unstuck.

The other thing that tends to worry people a lot is that when they do think about making a transition or shifting paths, it feels very risky like leaping off a cliff. But if you give yourself a long enough runway, you're not leaping into anything.

Michael Schein: I’ve also noticed that many conscientious people feel guilty when they are tempted to divert even a small part of their attention away from their main focus. What would you say to someone experiencing something like this?

Dorie Clark: I’d tell them that the 20% of the time you’re spending on your area of interest actually could be the thing that saves you. Referring to one of my other books, Entrepreneurial You, there was a story that I tell about podcaster Pat Flynn. Pat Flynn used to work at an architecture firm. He was trying to pass the LEAD certification exam—the exam for green building standards—and he created a blog where he was posting his study notes. It started to become popular. He thought to himself, "Huh, I wonder if I turn this into a PDF, would anyone buy it?” It turns out, yes, they would. It became shockingly successful. Within a couple of months, he was actually earning more from selling his eBook online than he was from his day job. This turned out to be very handy because it was 2008, so he got laid off when the bottom fell out of the building boom.

We have to think of our careers very much as a stock portfolio. And you want to have the bonds, but you also need to have the speculative high-growth stocks. Your side bets are the growth stocks.

Michael Schein: How can you tell if it’s worth shifting the bulk of your attention from what is currently your main focus to one of your side experiments?

Dorie Clark: Obviously if something blows up and it's wildly successful, it’s easy to know. What is more often the case is you get tiny hints. One of the things that I talk about in The Long Game is a concept I call “watching for the raindrops.” Success never starts as a rainstorm; it starts with raindrops. Many of us are oriented in such a way that we're expecting the massive thunderstorm, but we need to look for the small hints. The small hints can be very subtle and they can often be overlooked. It could be an email from somebody complimenting you on something. It could be that you get invited to be on some totally random person's podcast in Australia. If you're waiting for Tim Ferriss to call you, you're going to be like, "Well, what is this? This doesn't matter." But the point is a stranger sought you out and thought that something was interesting. That is actually a data point that is worth listening to. It’s about looking for these little subtle signs.

Michael Schein: On the other hand, how do you know when it’s time to consider one of your experiments a “failed experiment?” In other words, is there a method to use to know when it’s time to ramp down a bet without all the self-flagellation that usually comes along with it?

Dorie Clark: What you need to do is seek feedback all along the way from people who fulfill a few criteria. They have to be people that legitimately care about you and want the best for you. At the same time, they need to be people who know enough about your world to be able to accurately advise you. Unless your mom is literally in your profession, you can't really trust her judgment about whether you should be persevering or not.

Also, it’s important to keep in mind that there are often multiple paths to a goal, and so we shouldn't necessarily get too wedded to one particular vehicle. Like if you are a high school senior, and you say "Harvard or Bust," and you don't get into Harvard, is your life actually over? If you can go to Duke, if you can go to Princeton, if you can go to Bowdoin, Mazel, that's really good too. And so, just because one particular door is closed, it doesn't mean your dream is dead. It just means you might need to think about a slightly different way to do it.