A while back, the guy who does Humans of New York posted this about a talk he gave, Brando Stanton says,
Love the quote they chose to pull. Can’t be emphasized enough.
Humans of New York creator and photographer Brandon Stanton spoke to a sold out crowd at Eisenhower Auditorium Thursday night. “There are so many people that use ‘following your dreams’ as an excuse to not work,” he said. “When in reality, following your dreams, successfully, is nothing but work.”
I love this. Kelly and I had a brief “messaging” conversation today. She is slammed right now with work, social commitments and living on her own (pay bills, keep the car running, dentist appoints, shopping, etc.). This is a recurrent theme between Christian and I, too. We have always had to perform triage on our opportunities and commitments on an almost daily basis. Is this opportunity going to help us or hurt us? Do we need to take time to smell the roses today or do we need to just put our head down and work?
Now the conversation has turned to whether our consistent high level of frenetic work will end. It is a hard question. Consistency is more important than the freneticism and it is good to take time to reflect and rest. It is important, also, to take the time to ask the question, “What is the point?” Sometimes the answer really is that there IS no point and one’s ways should change. Our educational goal in homeschool and at an undergraduate level was to finish well and get into a grad school. We did that. We are done.
Now that the kids are in graduate school, they need to decide whether what they are doing really meets any goals they want to accomplish. They have now entered “life” and school for school’s sake is not sufficient reason to continue. So if the hard work of graduate school is replaceable with hard work to meet another, more noble end, then it makes a lot of sense to do that.
The other part of this “follow your dream” equation is the dream itself. It seems like many, many dreams in our narcissistic generation are selfish dreams, but that is a topic for another day.
Betty Blonde #191 – 04/09/2009
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.