While other kids grew up playing sports, music, singing, acting in plays, I chose to grow up daydreaming.
Now just to be clear, nobody ever said I couldn’t do any of these typical childhood activities.
Nobody, that is, except for me.
As a kid, I had been gifted with two arms, two legs, and one speech impediment with a scoop of coordination differences on top. As this was my reality, I quickly realized that I felt far more confident, effective and powerful in my daydreams than I did in my everyday life.
For me, daydreaming was miraculous. I was very good at it. I could do it anytime. I could be a hero like Daniel LaRusso, the “Karate Kid” or an adventurer like Dr. Henry Walton Jones, Jr, the great “Indiana Jones” as often as I pleased.
What could be the downside of all that?
Well, imagine your livelihood comes from farming. You have hundreds of acres of fertile cropland. If you plant your fields in the spring, cultivate and spray during the summer, and harvest in the fall you’ll likely do just fine for yourself. You’ll have plenty of money to support your family and probably even enough left over to do a little traveling.
But you’ve got this dream of starting a radio station in a nearby town that’s just bliss to imagine. You know the perfect main street building to house your station too. It will say, “KRAD” in neon. You can just see how crisp and professional it looks. All growing season your mind is twenty miles away, focused on future programming, rotation, and basically everything but growing corn, and beans, and feeding cattle. The elation in your head seems far superior to the monotonous slog that is your rural life. You choose to spend your day tuned to the station of your preoccupation, while your farm becomes a mess. Come October, your harvest is pitiful.
If our daydreaming makes us oblivious to the needs and wants of our daily life, at some point we’ll reap uncomfortable consequences.
As a kid, my Dad would play “All I Have To Do Is Dream” by the Everly Brothers. One of the lines goes, “Only trouble is gee whiz, I’m dreamin’ my life away.”
It took me many years to figure out that “dreamin’ my life away,” wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
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JASON FREEMAN is a Professional Speaker and the proud owner of a Speech Impediment. He is also the author of “Awkwardly Awesome: Embracing My Imperfect Best” and a Perseverance Coach.
He excites and encourages his audience to break through the barriers of their own limitations using a method he created, called “Doing your Imperfect Best ™”.
His Imperfect TEDx Talk can be viewed here.
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