#9—Your Dreams Are a Lie (Probably) 💭
How to Make Better Life Goals
Hi! 👋🏽
Happy Wednesday, everybody. We're a week strong into Dickie Bush's 🛳️Ship 30 for 30. Here is one my favourite screenshot essays from these past seven days.
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In this week's LWH🏡 issue:
🎙️ — Fungus Amungus (Radiolab) and Dax Shepard on the Craft of Podcasting, Favourite Books and Dancing With Your Demons (The Tim Ferriss Show)
🎵 — CHOMP EP by Russ (Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube)
📃 — Hello Fresh: The World's Most Ruthless Food Startup by Burt Help (Inc.com)
📃 — Your Dream is a Lie (Probably)💭 👇🏽 [In this email]
📕 If We Are Not Part of the Solution, We Are Part of the Problem
This week I finished Ibram X. Kendi's How to be Antiracist. I don't generally read books on social justice, but Kendi's depth of knowledge and beautifully interwoven narrative make this book a must-read, especially in today's social climate. From the relatively recent invention of racial discrimination to how to think about activism, this book begins to equip us with the tools we need to confront racism and its many layers in our own day-to-day. We are all actively complicit in upholding a system of injustice until we are actively not. Read here.
🎙Another Reason to be Afraid of the Climate Crisis
In typical RadioLab fashion, the show explains a strange phenomenon, adding context and blowing your mind along the way. Our bodies are becoming susceptible to potentially millions of new species of fungi. Listen here.
🎙Vulnerability is Magnetic
Dax Shepard, host of the blockbuster podcast Armchair Expert, has an honest conversation with Tim about how and why he relapsed after 16 years of sobriety, among other things. His honesty is hard to look away from, and his enthusiasm for understanding the human condition is infectious. Dax is a rare model for how to successfully and healthily bring people's ugliness to the surface for fruitful discussion. Listen here.
🎵OMNOMNOM
Independent artist poster-child Russ releases CHOMP, a 5-track EP with lyrical heavy-hitters like Black Thought, Benny the Butcher, and Busta Rhymes. Despite receiving a lot of criticism from people, it's always his bombastic attitude that people take issue with. The music is always top-tier. Listen here.
📃 Deliver Me From (Growing) Pain
This deep-dive into Hello Fresh's calculated origin story and conditions into its fulfillment centres is staggering. The founding team took the "Move fast and break things." mantra of Silicon Valley to heart during the early years, and continue to war for market share with competitors. With a customer retention rate of only 15% a year after initial sign up, meal kit delivery will be a ruthless industry until there is a clear winner. Read here.
Your Dream is a Lie (Probably)💭
How My Dream was a Lie
In the summer of 2016, I had just completed a four-year bachelor's degree, double majoring in medical science and psychology. Near the end of my degree, I had decided to apply to MBA school. Career paths born from a science education (e.g., research, medicine, dentistry, etc.) just didn't excite me. An MBA would give me more exciting options, but business school intimidated me. I had not been good at finance and accounting classes when I took them electively during my undergrad, and I assumed that I would be surrounded by ambitious, cutthroat, money-minded types with whom I would struggle to connect.
Before any formal business training, though, I became enamoured by the idea of marketing. I thought coming up with cool designs and slogans and creative directions for ad campaigns and brands could be fun and interesting, and I thought I might have a knack for putting together eye-catching, funny copy. As if out of thin air, this dream of becoming a lofty creative marketing executive took up a lot of space in my brain. Overnight, I wanted to be surrounded by creative progressives that wore colourful socks and casually used French words in conversation. Post-its and "story-boards" and Prezi. I was intoxicated by the idea of being climbing the ranks as a young, stylish, charming employee at some multinational consumer packaged goods company. Any of the brand below would have been just fine.
To get a start on what I thought would be a long, fruitful career in marketing, I got a position as an intern at a marketing agency in downtown Toronto. I had no idea what marketing was, but boy, was I going to be phenomenal at it.
I was at the agency for four months. I learned about liaising with clients, conducting environmental scans to track competitor behaviour, mapping out the logistics for delivering experiences to potential customers. I met a lot of "marketing" types, too. Colourful socks and casual French and all.
And I hated it.
Not only was the work boring, but I felt the industry as a whole grated against so many of my core values on a daily basis that I ended each workday with a mini existential crisis. What the hell was I doing here? These weren't my people. We wanted different things from life, had different ideas of fun, argued in different ways. Although I was an intern, I saw how higher-ups interacted with each other and set their priorities and it dawned on me that this wasn't for me. I wanted to be a marketing executive until I realized it would mean a lifetime of misery.
Since then, I’ve thought a lot about where this idea of becoming a creative marketing executive came from. It sounds nebulous. Maybe the allure of the title was rooted in my inability to actually imagine a day in the life of this dream job. Maybe if I had taken the time to do more research into how the marketing and advertising world worked, I wouldn't have gotten so excited about it in the first place. If I had thought more critically about whether the things I enjoyed doing (storytelling, design, writing) aligned with how an executive spends their time (politicking, landing new clients, navigating issues with employees), I might have realized all of this sooner.
Realistically, I took some stuff I knew I was good at in an industry that was mysterious (re: interesting), slapped on a title that would make my parents proud and sound good at cocktail parties, and called it a "dream."
We've all done this. This is how we get a lot of our dreams.
And I think this experience of recognizing that our "dreams" don't fit us well, like clothes grabbed off the rack at a thrift store, is almost universal. For the many of us who graduate school without knowing exactly what we want to do in life, we reach for anything that sounds exciting to us without knowing any of the more granular details of what that dream entails. We start with what sounds interesting and work backwards. We research a career path, the required education, we reach out to the right people, and we try to land an entry-level position that we believe will set us up for success. That’s what everybody else does, right?
Let's try to pick apart where we get our dreams from to hopefully pave the way for owning our dreams down the road.
The Dark Side of Inspiration
Family
No brainer here. Our parents encourage career paths that they believe will allow us to easily support ourselves and our families. They want us to have freedom and options in all aspects of our live. They nudge us towards law school, engineering school, medical school. Something they feel will earn respect and open up doors for us in our lives.
Our parents are among the most convincing people on the planet when it comes to persuading us that a goal is worth our time. We know they mean well and their approval means so much. Quite easily, many of us we lose sight of whether we are working hard for ourselves or for our family. Most of us are so conditioned that we barely know how to distinguish between the two.
The subtle and subconscious glorification of some career paths begins before our family could ever know our nature and ideal life circumstance; when we are toddlers and before we have an idea of what gives us energy, what we find fulfilling, and which problems we care to solve. But unfortunately, the indoctrination begins without any concern for those things.
Peers
During our impressionable adolescent years, we so desperately want to seem cool. Our idea of success is also heavily influenced by what our peers find impressive and worthy of envy. We see what garners attention in our social circles and exaggerate those traits in ourselves. Sometime without even knowing it. We implicitly pick up on which goals would make colleagues and co-workers pat our backs in praise and which would make them furrow their brows in confusion, and we keep the latter ones to ourselves.
We convince ourselves that we only want the dreams we can say out loud more. Dreams we aren't encouraged to voice and learn to be embarrassed about get relegated to "Someday" status in light of more "realistic" goals, despite the people giving you advice somehow overlook the fact that the goals they deem "realistic" are likely some of the most unrealistic at all.
Art
When we're young, TV shows and movies can define a profession for us, making it seem overly glamorous. Some of us want to be lawyers because we watched the first season of Suits or basketball players because of Michael Jordan in Space Jam. Some of us may have even gotten interested in the thought of academia and teaching one of the social studies because of Dan Brown's favourite protagonist, Robert Langdon, of The Da Vinci Code fame.
It's important to acknowledge that a character created for entertainment convinced us that their profession was a good way for us to make a living, when in reality, lawyers, basketball players, and professors of symbology probably have vastly different lives than what was portrayed. We mostly fall in love with how the actor portrays the role, not with how we ourselves would look in the role. And the two are worlds apart.
Culture
It's no surprise that the environments in which we are raised inform our idea of success. Our culture, the water in which we are all swimming and from which there is no escape, glorifies a small handful of professions and neglects all others, no matter how crucial for society, lucrative for those families, and fulfilling for those people. We have a tacit understanding of which professions are "respectable" and which are not. And based on my observations, there is no correlation between respectability and fulfillment, respectability and usefulness, or respectability and happiness.
To win the approval and praise by those in our culture, we have a tendency of making easily understandable and respectable professions our dream jobs. It's our dream to own an expensive car and a luxury home because our culture informs us that that's when we'll be undeniably, indisputably, irrefutably successful with absolutely no mind given to whether those goals mesh well with our natures. Those that are naturally more nomadic or community-minded or thoroughly fulfilled being a home-maker are labelled unambitious, "hippies", and flippantly dismissed as unsuccessful. We feel like we can only be serious about dreams that have extravagant earning potential since that is the single most important metric by which our culture assesses the validity of our dreams. In other words, any dream that doesn't make for you more money than you know what to do with is not worth having in the first place.
A Better Dream
Family, peers, art, and culture implant into our minds dreams that we become so used to trumpeting as our life goals that we miss opportunities to realize that we barely believe the words we are saying to others. When we consider our own satisfaction, our dreams barely make a ripple in the oceans of our souls. Our eyes are empty and cavernous when we talk about our futures. This cannot be how a dream is meant to make us feel. But reconsidering a handful of goals that have given our lives meaning and direction for potentially decades is panic-inducing. The thought of letting go of a dream somebody else convinced us to pursue feels like amputation.
There's the fear of ambiguity and a mourning of the sunk costs. What will fill the void left behind once I remove these dreams? What about everything I've done to achieve these goals until now? And people who set their own goals based on a deep understanding of their nature are called unforgiving names. They're called reckless, irresponsible, stupid, unrealistic. People will make a point to separate themselves from those that have goals that they do not understand. And that's a good thing. When others are uninterested in, or uncomfortable with, our goals, we're beginning to form a new type of goal—one that is rooted in self-understanding and independent thought.
Goals that align with our natures are inherently more motivating and exciting to work towards. We feel less—not more—stress as we work towards them, and we find people who we can more and more easily include in our tribes as we make our away deeper into a new world through our journeys. To identify these goals, we must first attempt to understand ourselves. Which problems are we interested in dedicating ourselves to solving? What kind of lifestyle do we actually want a decade from now? How can I ensure that what I like to do for fun is accessible and affordable? We must try our best to come up with options that satisfy these requirements instead of working the other way around. We must try to identify the work that truly feels like play.
Amputating others' dreams from our life plan does not feel like a loss after the initial shock. In fact, we feel light and mobilized, free to take on challenges that move us. Action no longer feels uninspiring. It feels like the only way forward.
So what are your dreams?
Home-bound,
Vandan🏡
@veryjhaveri
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