Having dreams is a hard thing. It takes time to realise dreams. A lot of time. At the moment I'm just learning how to code and understand a piece of kit that facilitates my project. That was what I was doing all of yesterday evening. My housemates asked if I wanted to go out for a drink with them and a big group of friends yesterday. It seemed like it could have been a good night. But I've always got something on, if I let it. Small distractions. Small events, eating away my free time until I have nothing left. Football on Monday evening, second job on Tuesday, Gym/board games on Wednesday... the list goes on. I have to sacrifice something. We only have 24 hours in the day. So I decided to sacrifice seeing friends and ended up staring at code, alone in my silent room, for 4 hours. I didn't get very far. I learnt a few tricks but it definitely didn't feel like 4 hours worth of learning.
With a lot of dreams, we have to have a little bit of faith. How do I know that the product I'd like to create would be bought by anyone? This product is solving a problem that I perceive as being big within my life, but on talking to my friends, they don't seem to agree. How do I convince them, or anyone else, that this is a problem they didn't realise they had until it's been fixed with my product? How do I know that they'd see any worth in the product? Or, more specifically: more worth than the value I'm selling it for? Even if I do put the hundreds of hours in... how do I know that it won't all be for nothing?
This morning I asked my housemates how their evening was. They said it was really good: it turns out a lot of people were able to go and it was a good group. That hit me a little bit. Is my dream really worth missing countless evenings like these with friends, when I don't even know whether it'll ever become reality or not?
The transition from dream to reality isn't a sliding scale, in my view. It's almost binary. All of the development of the product or service needs to remain within the 'dream' realm: you need to first make sure your product is viable, you need to see if you can find the right group of manufacturers to make it, you need to put it up on Kickstarter and get a proof of product to show that people would actually want what you're making. You can't rush those things. Putting lots of money into creating a fancy website and setting up deals, to find out you can't develop the product isn't logical. Developing your product, setting up the manufacturing line, spending loads of money on raw material to make it... to find out no-one will buy it because you were too impatient to do a Kickstarter or study target markets isn't logical. You need to get everything ready before you invest money, constantly working out whether it's a viable product, until everything's ready to go and you can transition from dreams -> reality.
At the moment, I've only just set off from the start. I've moved along the timeline a little bit, but I'm still well on the 'dreams' plateau. But as you move along the timeline, it'll only ever get harder. I'll have invested more and more time and energy, and the dream will still have obstinately remained a dream. It'll still remain a dream for a very long time until I've got everything in place, and only then can I make a decision about whether we can actually go forward with making it all reality. The thought of this is pretty unnerving. I can see why a lot of people decide to relinquish their dreams in favour of a "normal job".
On the flip side, I see why people rush into projects and try to make their dreams a reality way before they're ready to do so. It's painful to continue to put time into something without seeing any kind of returns for years. I've read many books which recount people who just quit their jobs, proclaiming "I'm going to start a yoga class!", with no idea of the 'business' side of running a business, and fall flat on their face.
That timeline is a bit misleading as well. It implies that when you've finally turned your dreams into reality, you've made it: it's the end of the timeline. Really, though, the 'dreams' section is just cleaning and priming the wall, preparing it to make sure it's ready. Then you turn it into reality and the big stuff starts happening: you need to start actually painting the wall. It's at that point that things get rolling.
I think Sam Esmail summed it all up pretty well in his series, Mr Robot. This is from Season 1, Episode 5 (the last five minutes, if you want to look it up):
"My father picked me up from school one day and we played hooky and went to the beach. It was too cold to go in the water so we sat on a blanket and ate pizza. When I got home my sneakers were full of sand and I dumped it on my bedroom floor. I didn't know the difference, I was six. My mother screamed at me for the mess but he wasn't mad. He said that billions of years ago the world shifting and oceans moving brought that sand to that spot on the beach and then I took it away. Every day he said we change the world... which is a nice thought until I think about how many days and lifetimes I would need to bring a shoe full of sand home until there is no beach. Until it made a difference to anyone. Every day we change the world. But to change the world in a way that means anything: that takes more time than most people have. It never happens all at once. Its slow. Its methodical. Its exhausting. We don't all have the stomach for it."
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