“Dream Big!” is a pretty popular slogan nowadays. The very essence of Dreaming Big seems so American to me: in America, everyone has to have their American Dream & it better be BIG! It sounds so simple: we just have to discover what we were born to do & then do it with joy. So simple. Yet, almost impossible. Many motivational speakers & authors of self-help books suggest unique step-by-step strategies to pursue our «Big Dream» carrot, which for the majority of people does not come any closer & keeps hanging right in front of their noses while they are running in circles, desperately trying to reach it.
Six years ago, I attended a very inspiring «Dream Big» workshop by my favorite author Bob Goff, where I tried to find my Big Dream & outline the steps that would bring it to life. It was a lot of fun! I was certain that I had found my Big Dream & I was determined to achieve it!
After the workshop, I went on to live my life & in the process, I managed to discover totally different passions that brought me where I am today, to my great surprise!
So what is better: have one Big American Dream Carrot & pursue it with all you have, or discover multiple passions & mix them up in an exciting smoothie with a unique taste of your own? Managing our family business in Ukraine for over 12 years and then switching into a new role of online education professional in the US Higher Ed system made my career look more like an “all-I-have-in-my-fridge” smoothie than one beautiful straight carrot that was supposed to gradually grow & become my one & only career goal. The more mind-blowing & liberating appeared to be one concept that I learned from the “Designing Your Life” book by Stanford professors that only 20% of people know their “Big Dream” while the other 80% have more than one passion in their lives! Halleluiah!
Moreover, those multiple passions could be discovered only by trying new things in incremental steps, called Prototyping, which is one of the crucial design principles that help eliminate the biggest stumbling block of making any progress – fear of missing out on your whole life by pursuing the wrong “carrot.” Wow. Such knowledge is instrumental for immigrants as we are not only designing a new logical step in our careers or tackling some encore career opportunities but rather re-designing from scratch all of our lives in a new country with a foreign culture & language.
It is vital for us to learn as soon as possible how to overcome the fear of failure & fear of not achieving our best potential, aka “Big American Dream,” by prototyping our way forward and enjoying the process of being bilingual multitalented & multi-passioned wonderful human beings we are.
