Building for tomorrow by dealing with the here and now
The greatest threat to your dreams is not an absence of presence, but the drought of thought — AGB 2019
I’ve been listening to Cat Steven’s Tea from the Tillerman album recorded and released in 1970 and this particular line from the Father and Son track struck me:
“You may be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not”.
This got me thinking.
Often times, when we discuss matters of time and currency, we think only of physicality, but since we’ve come to understand time to be an abstract concept with impact (positive or otherwise) that is mostly felt in the subconscious, then perhaps the takeout should be the reverse.
For the purpose of demonstration, let’s imagine the lyric said “You may (NOT) be here tomorrow, but your dreams (WOULD)”. A lot of people would relate to this. It’s the classic message of leaving a legacy. Powerful, yet probably inaccurate. There’re no guarantees that you’ll outlive your dreams. Too many empires have perished after the demise of the dreamer, yet this is not a history lesson.
So we go back to the original lyric. The message feels different. The closest analogy I can give is losing your train of thought for just a second. You experience that all too familiar feeling of having an idea, a thought, moments before but now it’s suddenly gone, lost in an often complex nexus of grey matter, sometimes never to be found again. You feel incomplete, disoriented, naked!
I guess what I’m trying to say is that you should worry less about what happens to your dreams when you’re not there and instead worry more about what happens to your dreams when your mind is no longer there.
I advise that you START BY MAKING A NOTE — some would recommend a mental one, but I know how tricky that can get due to our forgetful nature so I prefer the physical type. That stuff you really want to do, write it down now — your state of mind might not remain the same the next minute, the next day or several years later but that record could just be the difference between a great idea and a lost one.
And here’s the catch, all these could happen without you being there and you still get the credit/the reward. Or both.
Just do it.
Ayoola Gbade-Bello is an emerging Tech, Media and Social Entrepreneur that has overseen the development of several high-growth companies and projects. He possesses a strong track record of growing ideas to business, developing impactful market strategies, increasing market share and profitability, directing budget planning initiatives and building highly productive teams.
