At age 22 I had a dream.
If you asked me, I preferred to call it a “goal” — there were steps I knew I’d need to follow, and there were some concrete limits on how much available time I had to make it happen — but for the sake of this post, we’ll use dreams.
My dream was to play professional basketball somewhere, somehow.
I remember telling people about my dream. I was always met with questions —

How?
Where?
When?
How does it work
Do you even have teams looking at you?
Do you have an agent or manager?

— that I didn’t have good answers to. But I was 22, fresh out of college and young enough for my ambition to be cute, and dumb enough to believe it.
It happened.
The memory got me thinking: why does it get so much harder for any of us to dream in that way as we get older?
Here are some reasons I came up with.
We know too much
I don’t golf, but I once read that the young golfer usually beats the old golfer, and not because the younger golfer is better at golf.
The younger player wins because he is ignorant of all the possible failures.
The old golfer, with all his experience and knowledge, knows every possible pitfall on the course. He knows all the ways he could fail. He knows what it feels like to fail, because it’s happened several times before.
The young golfer is too green to know any of this. He hasn’t been around long enough to know. And that very ignorance is his advantage.
It’s the same with all of us.

Yes — knowledge, when used the right way, is power. But knowledge, when it reminds us of past and possible mistakes, can also be our biggest weakness.
Sometimes it’s beneficial to be ignorant.
Experience has hardened us
For many people, the more we know, the less we are willing to try.
Unconsciously, we feel satisfied that we know enough about enough, and don’t need to dip into any new waters. Doing or learning new things are for the inexperienced, those who haven’t done the years of schooling, read the books, attended the conferences and took the notes that we have.
Or, we only accept new ideas and information when it comes from our personally-verified sources, those which are as experienced and as smart as we are. Anything else can’t possibly be valid.
The experience of failure also pushes us deeper and deeper towards safety. Failure hurts. Emotional and physical pain both register in the same regions of the brain. Most of us are hardwired to avoid even the possibility of failure or danger, so we do what we know works. We stick to what’s safe, dependable and as close to guaranteed as we can get.
Paradoxically, our experience keeps us from acquiring more of it.

The antidote is to use our knowledge in a different way: we know that whatever failure or danger we encounter along the way, we’ll have the tools to handle it.
We have to live up to expectations
Experience and habit create expectations. People expect us to behave in a certain way, to follow certain routines, to do what we’ve always done. They get upset when we don’t follow protocol.
Or, at least we think they do.
The expectations that we find ourselves unconsciously living up to or afraid to challenge aren’t those of other people — they’re expectations that we’ve slapped on ourselves. We tell ourselves that the expectations are coming from other people when they’re actually coming from us.
We don’t step outside of our own self-made boxes because we have to conform to the person we see ourselves as being.
Here’s the thing, though: Humans are quite an adaptable species.
We adjust to new circumstances, behaviors and facts rather quickly and seamlessly. We may kick and scream and complain for a bit, but we eventually grow comfortable with whatever change has been thrust upon us once we realize that it’s not going back to how it used to be. If and when you decide to do something new and different and outside-of-the-box, everyone — including you — will eventually accept it as the new normal.
There may be discomfort, in the form of questions, comments, ridicule, awkwardness and isolation, amongst other energies, but the world will adjust to you as long as you stick to your guns — even if you have no idea yourself where this change will lead.

#1144: When To Ignore What You Know

For Your Game
What did you believe / routinely do 10-15 years ago that gave you energy and made you feel alive, that you’ve completely gotten away from since? Why?
What dream(s) would be “unrealistic” for someone in your position of experience and status?

#WorkOnYourGame