D-Day is worthy to remember if only to make sure we never need another triumph like that ever again. It is a terrible tragedy that we are so well gifted with the capacity to dream but do terrible things for despicable reasons.
Now that we are in the 21st century and knowledge so easily accessible I hope the necessity for greed will melt away. An average human needs 2000 calories a day, a decent shelter and good people to share a laugh with. A few good dreams and I think all our needs are met.
My personal dream is that one day it won’t matter neither where you were born nor how wealthy, I imagine humanity that dreams together of science and space exploration, so we can learn about and beyond the world we live in.
One of the greatest effects that working in the Silicon Valley had on me and one of life’s lessons I will never forget, in the greatest possible ironies of all, is that dreams come true. To dream well is very important and making a very good dream come true is very, very profitable. Ironic right? One of the management manuals at Lucasfilm had to Dream at number one position to do when starting a project.
In The Valley, as one of the most economically motivated places on earth after New York, the crazier the dream – the better likelihood it will get funded. An easy dream is easy to be dreamed up by the numbers. A hard dream has more likelihood to be unique and to get traction. Thus was Silicon Valley made on dreams. You would think that first came the money.. no, in fact a lot of the companies in the Valley that later went on to make global impact on literally millions of people, were started in the backyards of modest homes.
Hollywood Hills mansions are built on dreams.The dream factories of Hollywood create very profitable dreams by selling a great product at bargain prices, a movie that costs millions to make is sold to us for 15 bucks a piece. For Ridley Scott, for Spielberg, (no longer) for George – it is a numbers game. What has boggled my mind is the scale of it all. It really is of biblical proportions.
So imagine a Michelangelo – okay, perhaps that won’t work if you have no special place in your heart for George Lucas – imagine hundreds of talented individuals who collectively make up a Michelangelo talent. And they toil day and night and make a perfect marble statue. And the next day half a billion people on the planet get one, the same exact perfect copy. For a tenner. That’s Hollywood for you and this is how it works.
My old little iPhone is a dream, right? Gandalf the Grey’s Staff of Power is like a stupid twig compared to what the latest generation iPhone can do. In that regard Gandalf is practically a puppet compared to the great wizard Steve Jobs. My Mac Book Pro beats any wizard from Harry Potter at magic, I can put together a figment of my imagination and send it to 3D print across the globe and voila – we have a conjuring. There is a great website about the origins of the mac here: http://www.folklore.org/index.py if you are interested in how people dreamed up this magical device.
One thing that becomes clear is that dreams don’t come true in a dreamlike manner. Usually hard work is involved and serial dreaming. Make sure to have a good dream dreamed up. A good dream ensures you will be entertained and motivated for a long time. Because if money is all you wanna have – then you are all done when you get it and might as well order yourself a wooden box.
When you were growing up they told you to stop dreaming and plant you feet on the ground.. when instead they should have told you to dream more.. and better. It is important to have more than one dream. One day you will outgrow a dream, or an organization – you will need to be ready for the moment to employ another dream. Use your time wisely to dream better, get better at dreaming.