Quote Roundup #2: On dreams, failure, and success

Pursuing your greatest desires involves both falling and flying.

Feb 26, 2024

I had to lug about a dozen notebooks filled with hundreds of excerpts from books I’d read in order to find some gems that seemed to thematically coalesce for this month’s Quote Roundup. What’s worth noting is that my eyes landed on the first two almost immediately, and they both originated from two separate notebooks. Right away, I realized that they’re touching on similar points —about dreams and work —so I thought, This is what happens when I have no plans or ideas about what to write.

Sometimes, things just come together beautifully.

The last two quotes involve emotionally activating words: success and failure. Here’s the thing about both: We get to define what each means to us. The problem is that we tend toward abstract, lofty ideals when we are dreaming of our personal successes, while we also nitpick every tiny setback or obstacle that hinders our definition of success and label these as failures.

So…

Dreams? Work? Success? Failure? I happen to think they are all characters in the drama of our life, and each plays a vital role in how we view ourselves, what is meaningful for our lives, and how we interact with others.

When I write, the page and my fingers and my dreams are all the same thing for an hour. I always emerge startled.1

You don’t have to be a writer to relate to this. Think of something you love to do. Maybe it’s cooking. Gardening. Hiking. Sewing. Driving. It could be the work you do for a living, but maybe it’s not. What makes sense to me about this quote is that we must get lost —we must forget ourselves and set aside our cerebral thinking —in order to emerge startled at what we are capable of creating.

If you can dream it up, then get off your butt and make it happen. Good things come from focus and effort.2

Several years ago, a friend gifted me an Audible book by Angela Duckworth called Grit. Listening to it taught me something I’d never heard before —that talent is really a misnomer. The people who are labeled as prodigies, phenoms, gifted, etc. are actually practicing a specific skill thousands of times in order to achieve the level of greatness we are privileged to witness in them.

What I find encouraging about this quote is that we get to choose what we want to accomplish, but we have to be willing to invest the long, tedious “thousands of times” necessary in order to fulfill our deepest desires. It’s not childish to still carry a dream in your heart; it’s an indication that you still have a smidgen of wonder and awe —which Rick Rubin claims is the secret sauce to accessing your creative potential.

Why don’t we do the things we love? I think there are two main reasons. One, we give up early in life, because we think dreams are silly and unrealistic. (Some are, but so what?) And two, we abandon our dreams once we learn how hard it can be to pursue them to the end we have in mind.

Remember, you get to decide what is fulfilling for you, and once you do, you can make it happen if you are willing to go through many unforeseen difficulties.

If there a chance for failure here, there is also a chance for success.3

What if we told ourselves this more often? What if, when we came against a Goliath and all we had in hand were two small stones, we believed we could still overcome the onus we are facing? Years ago, as I began toying around with the idea of dropping my former label of Catholic spirituality writer and dipping my toes into the waters of memoir, I was often tormented by the risk of failure: What if I invest years into this new endeavor but never become a commercial success (which is my personal dream)?

I never told myself that the chance of succeeding at what I aimed to do was as great as my chance of not succeeding. What I did tell myself is that I would regret it if I never tried at all, and that’s how I ended up in this murky middle, where I’m neither a solidly established Catholic spirituality writer nor a commercially successful memoirist. Yet.

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.4

Okay, so this is a classic, but it’s worth placing in the roundup, because it goes along with this concept that our inner critic has a vested interest in sabotaging us. Whatever makes you most vulnerable (and creative work usually does) is earmarked for the critic to pounce on all sorts of reasons to quit:

Reminders of times you started something and did not complete it.
The fact that you haven’t gotten to your creative work as often as you’d like.
No one is asking for you to do this; therefore, no one really cares if you pursue your passion or not.
Remembering how people in our past a) laughed at our idea, b) said we’d never make money doing this, c) said we were daydreamers, or d) told us we should get a real job.

And so on. What if, starting today, we listened to the man who failed to produce a working light bulb 2,774 times before he finally landed upon a filament that worked with electricity? What if Thomas Edison had given up at try 2,773?

Ask yourself, How many times am I willing to try and fail before giving up, or am I willing to keep going until I get the result I want?

Quote Roundup #2: On dreams, failure, and success

Pursuing your greatest desires involves both falling and flying.

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