Here at the Coaching Blog- one of the world’s leading blogs on the subject of Leadership and Coaching we quite often post articles by leading authors and authorities- today we are delighted to post an article from Medium.com by Jon Westenberg.
I want you to believe in one crazy fucking dream.
When I talk about my goals. I don’t think most people take me seriously. I don’t think they believe that I’m serious, that I’m in touch with reality, or that I have any chance at achieving them. That’s because I believe in setting goals that anyone else would laugh at. I believe in setting goals that seem so far fucking out that they could turn me into a laughing stock.
There’s a lot of ideas running around my head at any given moment, and they’re often crazy. You know what I want to do? I want to impact 1,000,000 students about entrepreneurship and business. I want to build a generation of founders. Land a major publishing deal.
These are the goals that keep me up at night, working my ass off and struggling to grind through a to-do list that, to quote Malcolm Tucker, is longer than a Leonard Cohen song.
To my mind, being an entrepreneur is about taking risks, it’s about being prepared to put yourself on the line and aim for something higher. It’s about understanding that what you are working on can only be realised, can only be made into a reality if you let go of the inhibitions, and the limitations that you were never born with.
When I was a kid, I had no concept of what was humanly possible or achievable, and so I set my sights on the moon. I wanted to be an astronaut, a cowboy, a billionaire, a jet fighter pilot and a chef.
These weren’t conflicting dreams – to 8 year old me, I would juggle all of these professions as a day job, while still skateboarding for fun. It never would have occurred to me to even question how possible these goals were, what my chances looked like, how feasible it was…or whether the rest of the world would accept my dreams.
That kind of reckless fucking abandon is what I want to recapture right now. Because I know that If I stopped to worry about the chances of achieving my own personal moonshots, the statistical likelihood, the odds, I imagine I would be fucking depressed.
If I stopped to think about the way other people would react to my dreams, I’m not convinced I could even get the fuck out of bed in the morning. I’d be a piss-poor excuse for an entrepreneur with no chance of ticking off any goal, wandering around the Internet with my ass hanging out.
