Choose the riskier path and follow your dreams

by Dan Oswald

Comedian Jim Carrey is well known for his high energy and incredibly silly impressions and comedic routines. His movie roles have included characters such as Ace Ventura, the hapless pet detective, Lloyd Christmas, one-half of the Dumb and Dumber duo, and the Grinch from Dr. Seuss fame. When a colleague shared this clip from a commencement speech Carrey gave at Maharishi University, I was expecting to get a good laugh.

Instead, I found myself mesmerized by Carrey’s message to the young college graduates—so much so that I went back and watched the entire speech after watching this one-minute clip. What does Carrey say in just 61 seconds that so captured my attention? He had me with these two sentences: “So many of us choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality. What we really want seems impossibly out of reach and ridiculous to expect, so we never dare to ask the universe for it.”

Do you remember being a child and dreaming about what you might become one day? I do. I can remember my mother asking me at a very young age what I aspired to do as an adult. Maybe you dreamed of being an athlete or a movie star. Or maybe you wanted to be an astronaut, ballerina, or even president of the United States. Whatever your childhood dream was, where did it go?

Often we write those dreams off as the silly fantasies of a child, but here a man known for his silliness is telling us that so many of us give up on our dreams out of fear. That our dreams and aspirations seem so ambitious that we are scared into taking a path that appears more practical. Safe.

When you think about people you really admire, how many of them took the road less traveled? How many of them dared to dream and had the courage to chase those dreams? Sometimes we look at people and wonder how they achieved so much. Call it envy or curiosity or even amazement, but you just wonder what’s so different about them that they could have done so much. And as we wonder, we speculate. They must be smarter, more talented, or really lucky.

Have you ever stopped to think that maybe the people who seemingly have the world by the tail were willing to just go for it? That they had intestinal fortitude to follow their dreams when others succumbed to fear and took an easier path? For every successful entrepreneur, there are 100 people who shared the dream of starting their own business but instead went to work for someone else. For every congressperson, there are thousands of people who don’t want to put their ideas about governing forward or commit to public life. For every successful doctor, there are hundreds of people who thought med school would be too tough or the process would be too grueling.

It’s often said that 80 percent of success is just showing up. Maybe we need to rethink that. Maybe success is about being willing to follow our dreams, regardless of how ridiculous they may seem. Because what’s really the alternative to following your dreams? Settling. If we aren’t willing to follow our dreams, no one is going to do it for us, so we’re just plain ol’ settling. Carrey captures it perfectly when he says, “You can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance at doing what you love.”

We are told that if we find something we love to do, we won’t work a day in our life. Do we really believe it? When your husband tells you he wants to quit a perfectly good job to follow his dream, do you respond out of fear or do you encourage him? When your child announces she wants to pursue her passion, do you support her or caution her about the bleak prospects her chosen path may produce? It’s so easy to talk about doing what we love and loving what we do, but chasing dreams comes with risk. Are we just choosing our path—or encouraging others to choose theirs—out of “fear disguised as practicality,” as Carrey so aptly put it?

Let’s not forget there is a risk in choosing practicality, too. Doing so can produce a life filled with “what ifs” and “could have beens.” A life of regret based on giving up on your dreams to do something that seems so much more practical. A life in which you wonder why others are living your dream—and it may just be that they were willing to reach for the impossible.

I don’t know about you, but I think Jim Carrey nailed it. To really succeed, to really be happy, you need to follow your dream—whatever it may be. Success comes from happiness, and happiness comes from success. The beautiful thing is that we get to define what success is for us. It’s achieving our dream. What’s your dream?