Don’t Give Up on Your Dreams
Jess rappelling in Moab, UT in April 2023. Photo Courtesy of Mark Widmer.
Disappointed in your dreams? Don’t give up!
There is only ONE factor that determines whether or not you will fail at achieving your dreams: if you give up going after them. If you decide to stop moving forward, turn in the towel, and throw away your creative dreams and aspirations: that is the only way for them to truly die. If you have a setback, but then instead of giving up, you learn and grow from the experience, then you are actually getting CLOSER to succeeding.
Failures = Learning Opportunities
I’ve always dreamed of building my own thriving business. I have had some success in those efforts, with Joshua Tree Media and Bagpipe Master, but for every success there have been dozens of failures, where my serial rebranding-and-restarting efforts generating nothing but a large graveyard of abandoned ideas.
My first business attempt was in 2011. It was a Wordpress resource site for Spanish teachers called ¡Feliz Día! Spanish Immersion. At the time, I was at the University of Utah getting my undergrad degree in Spanish and I had a job teaching an extra-curricular Spanish class at a local elementary school.
One of my craziest business ideas was a merchandise website called “Celtswag” with all sorts of random print-on-demand celtic-themed products, from phone cases to blankets. Looking back, any of those ideas could have been great, if I had only been committed enough to stick with them and give them the time they needed to grow.
Patience, My Friend
You need to stop pressuring your creative ideas to bear immediate fruit. Start giving them 2-5 years to grow instead of 2-5 months, and watch what happens. Would you mow over the cute little stem of a tree right when it’s starting to grow, just because it isn’t producing fruit as fast as you think it should? No! A fruit tree doesn’t grow overnight, and the LAST thing to grow on them is the fruit. When you reset your expectations, you can build and grow from a healthier place of playful, joyful abundance.
Your Dream or Someone Else’s
The hard truth is this: you are either building your own dream, or getting paid to build someone else’s. Financial freedom is not just about covering your needs, it helps you get to a point where people can’t buy YOU or your time. There is so much more pressure to conform to whatever others want you to create when you are dependent on that paycheck. If you want true creative freedom, you have to first build and achieve financial freedom. You need to build a well-running financial machine that provides for your basic needs.
Balancing Your Dream with Your Reality
As you are taking your financial situation and risk tolerance into account, it might mean that it will take some time before you can get to the place where you can go all-in on building your own dream. If you are at the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, just struggling to survive, you might need to just find a job that covers the bills and gives you that financial security and stability as a foundation, and THEN go and build your creative work on the side.
You also need to be real with yourself about whether your dream is a HOBBY or a viable CAREER path. If you want to make money from your creative work, you have to provide value that people are willing to purchase. You need to be solving a problem of pain point for someone that they would be willing to pay for. This includes pursuing a creative job or career. You need to show that your work can solve problems for the organization.
Feeling Stuck in Your Current Career?
Are you confused about whether you should get a job, freelance, or start your own business? Are you feeling stuck and unfulfilled with your current career situation?
Check out my Creative Career Clarity course! This resource will help guide you on a journey of self-discovery to make a plan for your career path that you are excited about and that will help you breakthrough to greater career fulfillment.
Learn more at https://www.jessdansie.com/creative-career-clarity
