NADYA'S ENTREPRENEURIAL CORNER: Why You Need to Stop Pursuing Your Dreams

Are you triggered? You should be. What you just read is a damn triggering title. Why in the world would someone suggest that people stop pursuing their dreams? To be happy, to create a legacy, and to make money in a way that’s aligned with our purpose, shouldn’t we all follow our dreams? Why, yes. Yet I want to challenge you to stop chasing, and start actualizing.Quite possibly you’ve been pursuing your dreams for a long time. You have a dream map, a vision board, plans of attack. You envision where you want to be in five months, one year, five years, ten years. The dreams are there. Maybe you even moved from one Coast to another to chase the career you have always yearned for, yet spend most of your day working for someone else, and little energy left to take the steps to make that dream a reality. It’s okay though—you’re on a journey; you’re pursuing your dreams.The biggest problem I have seen with other entrepreneurs, artists, or any other person with a dream is that they stay locked in pursuit mode and never transition to action-taking mode. This is not just an issue of semantics. The definition of pursue is to “follow” or “continue on a path.” I am not negating from the necessity of an evolving journey. However, without setting goals to begin taking that dream and making it into a realized product, service, or lifestyle, the journey may quickly become a never-ending roundabout—like the hellish one in Washington, D.C.’s Dupont Circle. District folks: you know what I’m referring to.DreamerMade, the “world’s collaboration community,” is an online platform for dreamers ready to achieve their dreams. A hybrid of a project-management and collaborative platform, people on DreamerMade are taking gardening games, environmental initiatives, mobile apps, and entrepreneurship columns (um, hello!) from “dream mode” to active development.The DreamerMade team has developed a specific Culture Credo. It states that “each person has the potential to change the world for good,” and [DreamerMade] “connects [people] with the people and tools to make it real.”What is a dream without its realization? Stay tuned for an interview with the company’s founder, Ryan Dean, to learn how DreamerMade has become the definitive platform for the materialization of our dreams.–Want to learn more about Nadya’s Entrepreneurial Corner? Read the column’s mission statement here.If you think differently (or want to), keep checking Honeysuckle for more op-eds, interviews, and advice from our entrepreneur extraordinaire Nadya!—Nadya Rousseau is a Los Angeles-based digital marketing consultant and new media entrepreneur. She has worked with clients ranging from startups, to nationally recognized law firms, to nonprofits, to entertainers and more. Recently, Nadya established the Social Media Storytelling Academy with the goal of supporting thousands of professionals worldwide with sophisticated and cutting-edge social media education based in powerful storytelling strategies. When she’s not working, she can be found savoring a double espresso macchiato somewhere cool. Follow her adventures on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.