TM Article 5

Let Your Dreams Be Your Temporal Guide

by Rajen Devadason

Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.

Harriet Tubman

Time management, if looked upon solely as a skill that allows us to get more done in a fixed number of minutes, hours or days, becomes a sterile discipline.

However, if we learn to hitch great time management competencies to an enlarged vision of what our lives could and should be, then we enhance our ability to achieve true greatness. As a smart man named Walter Bowie once wrote, “The mightiest works have been accomplished by men who have kept their ability to dream great dreams.”

The same is true of women.

So, male or female, have you retained your ability to dream great dreams or have you lost your dreams through criminal neglect?

I know that you desire outstanding success - you wouldn't be here reading this if you didn't!

That's why I think it is vital that you awaken to this painful truth:

The vast majority of humanity fails to rise to its God-given potential because of what I call ‘dream theft’.

This widespread crime occurs each time someone puts us down and tears apart some deep-seated hope we’ve shared with them.

It's sad that there are such people, but what's even sadder is that most of us actually allow these dream assassins to succeed without even putting up a fight.

Why is that?

Part of the reason is that since life is often hard on us, we permit ourselves to be ground down by it. We then grow bitter, ineffectual and dreamless.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Sales legend Zig Ziglar teaches, “When you’re tough on yourself, life is going to be infinitely easier on you.”

Thankfully, such mature toughness doesn’t involve growling or ranting at the person in the mirror! No.

Instead, in the context of time management and dream rekindling, it translates into a brand of 'tough love' that efficiently ignites the laser focus and iron discipline that already reside inside you.

To spell things out, you must use your very definite capacity for focus and discipline to awaken your innate ability to dream big dreams. The alternative is too bleak to contemplate for very long.

Malcolm Forbes once wrote, “When you cease to dream you cease to live.” Of course, that doesn’t mean those who cease to dream stop breathing… only that they might as well not be using up precious oxygen for all the good they are doing for themselves and their planet!

You might say such sad people go through all the motions of being alive, yet there is a vacuum at the centre of their souls where true vitality once lived.

So, if you’ve been letting your dreams boil away under the intense heat of stressful living, I’m going to suggest an effective way of re-condensing them.

I hope you'll heed this advice, given in good faith. You see, your primary focus in time management must not be to 'manage your time', which cannot be manipulated by mortals, but to manage your personal life, your potential and, you guessed it, your dreams!

One way of managing your life healthily is to figure out which of your dreams inspire you sufficiently to warrant reworking them into high-octane goals.

These are the ones you should transform into major long-term life projects.

As with any extraction, identification and polishing process, you will need the right tools. I suggest you dig up or buy a ring-bound notebook; keep that little book and a pen with you over the next five days.

In it...

Quickly begin jotting down whatever dreams – wild or tame – you may still remember from your dim and distant childhood. Then add new ones as fast as you can think of them! Write down outlandish fantasies (living on the moon, perhaps) along with pedestrian ones (paying off your credit card bills in full each month).

Just in case you need some help, here's a fun starter list of 10 possible fantasies to get your mental juices flowing:

Chances are good that you won't be directly inspired by any of those dreams, but you should be able to use at least some of them as launch pads to your own forgotten dreams.

So, what I'd like you to do is fill your new notebook with every dream you can imagine or remember or think of!

At this point, don't worry at all about whether your written dreams and fantasies are practical or not. No one else is going to see that list unless you show it to him.

Then, over the next few days, as you toil to build your magical written list of dreams, keep reminding yourself that this is not an exercise in boring pragmatism or limiting realism.

In fact, now would be the ideal time to adopt as your own racy philosophy the attitude of George Bernard Shaw who once stated, "You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, 'Why not?'"

Your goal should be to actively resuscitate a, possibly, long-atrophied ability to dream big dreams.

This is the bottomline:

If you truly want to lay claim to a fantastic future, you need to start accomplishing fantastic things. You can only do so if you...

First, rekindle your latent human capacity for imagination and once again begin dreaming fantastic dreams.

Second, invest your precious time to turn your top ten dreams into properly worded goals with deadlines.

Third, prioritise those goals.

Fourth, from this point forth structure your work day and work week around bite-sized tasks that slowly but steadily move you toward those carefully refined and redefined dreams known as major life goals.

You probably know that American civil rights activist Dr Martin Luther King once declared he 'had a dream'.

His famous 'I Have A Dream' speech was delivered on August 28th 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial in DC.

Less than five years later, on April 4th 1968, his profoundly inspiring voice was extinguished in Memphis, Tennessee, by an assassin's bullet.

But though he died, his dream did not.

So, while you are still alive and well, don't your own dreams deserve the same right of realisation?

If you say yes, then while you still have breath, do what you need to do to recapture your dreams and bring them to life.

There can be no higher use for the precious time God's allotted you here on Earth.

© Rajen Devadason