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.
There’s stigma to dreaming, in that somehow to dream is to be detached from reality and not stand on firm ground. Or that it is not very profitable or practical, or very difficult. Of course it is. It is difficult to make a dream come true. You gotta make molecules do things they haven’t done before, you need to convince people to try something they have never seen or done before.
The Valley, as one of the most economically motivated places on Earth, was built on dreams. The crazier the dream – the greater likelihood to change the world. 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 motivator was 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.
Look at what Disney bought for four billion dollars – forty seven thousand characters. Not real estate, not diamonds or gold, nor oil wells. But Fantasy. Good dreams can be very profitable.
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 for months or years to 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.
I was watching a video of several movie directors of high caliber, guys that get handed hundreds of millions of dollars to work on dreams. One of them was Ridley Scott. The moderator asked Ridley if he got any surprises during filming. And he said, no, not really, I storyboard everything, it is exactly as I storyboarded it. I shoot the film on paper before we begin.
One thing that becomes clear is that dreams don’t come true in a dreamlike manner. Usually hard work is involved and serial dreaming. Dream up a good dream. A good dream ensures you will be entertained and motivated for a long time.
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.