Your Dreams Are Not About You
It's about something so much greater than you. Something only you have been chosen to bring to the world. To be sure, you are important, you are irreplaceable, you most certainly matter, but it's still not about you.
Your dreams belong to you, but they are not about you. Allow that to sink in. And once the ego shock wears off, breathe into that relief, that comfort, that freedom, that empowerment.
The truth is, whatever you set out to do, whatever you hope to accomplish in life, whatever lights you up in the morning and keeps you up at night, has never really been about you. You may exist at the center of it all, you may be the most valuable player, the star of your own movie, but it’s not really about you.
It’s about something so much greater than you. Something only you have been chosen to bring to the world. To be sure, you are important, you are irreplaceable, you most certainly matter, but it’s still not about you.
Doesn’t that ease the pressure? Doesn’t that feel lighter in your chest? Doesn’t that calm a bit of the fear? To know that you can mess up and make mistakes and, in the end, it doesn’t make you a bad person? It doesn’t make your efforts a waste?
That fear we feel is often the presence of ego, the presence of self-consciousness, of self-centeredness. Fear is what we feel when we are in pursuit of what we’ve always wanted, but instead of recognizing the role we play in the grand scheme of things, we are thinking only of ourselves—of how well we are doing, of how intelligent we seem, of how perfect we appear, of how we stack up, of what more we will get out of it.
Fear—of how we are defined, of what we take our failures and mistakes and missteps to mean about ourselves—is what holds our dreams at a steady distance, no matter how much we achieve; it will never be enough, never good enough to rest the ego.
Fear, then, appears to show us what to do next, rather than what to avoid. Fear tells us to lean in, there is work to be done; that here lies an opportunity to relinquish our self-centered thoughts and simply do what we were individually put here to do: to love, to create, to play, to do that which brings us joy and makes us feel most alive. And contrary to what many are taught to believe, this is not a selfish act. For whatever you desire to create in life has never been about you, but about the creation itself and the light it will bring to the rest of the world.
