Follow Your Dreams or Follow Your Heart?

My dream last night was way f—–d up, so … I’d be discerning.

The problem with the follow your heart/dreams thing, is that it assumes people have spent enough time discerning the language heart. I think it can speak to us through out dreams (in my case, a part of me is still seeking a resolution to something that happened years ago). And, I think following our dreams means having recovered enough of our authentic self for our dreams to be worth acting on.

Yes, you’ll probably need to take a risk, and that’s ok as long as you’ve calculated the cost and are comfortable taking responsibility for the outcome, but you don’t want to be foolhardy unless you really have a deep conviction this is the right course.

Elon Musk is kind of a hero for me, and he came so close to losing everything, it wasn’t funny (see 60 Minutes from last Sunday), but it amazingly worked out. Here was a guy with millions from PayPal who bet it all on starting two companies (Tesla, which makes electric cars, and SpaceX, which now shuttles stuff to space for NASA). But for someone like him, *not* taking the risk to pursue his dreams may have been like soul death. I suspect most of us would have been content to enjoy the millions he had.

Gary Zukav, one of Oprah’s favorite authors, was on Super Soul Sunday last week. He shares how struggling with addiction ultimately was a profoundly spiritual pursuit. I’m sure he didn’t feel that way at the time, but ultimately he came through very self aware or his mission and path.

Yes, sometimes we have to take a leap of “faith”, but it’s best if we’ve done a little homework and soul searching first.