Years ago, a newlywed couple spent a couple nights at the bed-and-breakfast my wife and I operated. Talking with us in the kitchen one afternoon, the husband declared that he intended to be a millionaire by the time he was 30. He was then working in some sort of direct sales outfit in which promotion and higher earnings came with recruiting new members to his team. When he headed back to their room to get his car keys, his wife smiled and said, “Well, dreams are free.”

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Real dreams, serious dreams, are never free. They come with a tremendous cost. The 18-year-old who for years has wanted to become a physician enters college knowing full well that she faces a decade or more of education and training to make that dream a reality. The carpenter fresh out of trade school with visions of one day founding his own construction company has countless hurdles to jump before meeting with success.

Unrealized or abandoned dreams also come with a price tag. When we find that our aspirations outrun our talents or our perseverance, that realization can leave a piece of the heart permanently broken. America is full of artists – painters, actors, writers – who dreamed of making the big-time and pursued their craft while waiting tables or doing odd jobs, only to find their efforts defeated by time, talent and circumstance.

Dreams always entail cost and risk. Pursue your dreams, and you’re entering a casino where there are no guarantees. For some, that prospect is frightening. Others are eager to get to the table, roll the dice, and see what happens.

To help these young dreamers along, lots of people offer encouragement and advice. You’ll find a plenitude of counsel online, often repetitive, including, “Make your goals as clear as possible,” “Follow your heart,” “Stay laser-focused once you begin the pursuit of your ambitions,” “Never give up,” “Be brave.”

Donald Trump tossed his own guidelines into this mix during his recent address to the graduating class of the University of Alabama. His long speech was both inspirational and unintentionally humorous, full-on Trumpian in its rambling discourse, its braggadocio, its inclusion of political jabs against opponents, and its enthusiasm. It’s the sort of speech that sends his haters into another orbit of Trump Derangement Syndrome while amusing those of us who long ago grew accustomed to his personality and his off-the-cuff peccadilloes from the podium. Boil his advice to the grads about success down to its bare essentials, however, and you’ll find that much of it matches the guidance given online.

To this freight car of recommendations, I’d like to add a few other suggestions regarding dreams, ambitions and success.

1. Make your dreams worthy of pursuit

To that young man who wanted to amass a million bucks by age 30, a considerable sum at the time, my response today would be, “To what end? Why do you want to build up a fortune?”

His desire for a wad of money reminds me of people who make happiness their goal. Both objectives are more often byproducts of some other ambition, not ends in themselves. Chase after happiness, for instance, and odds are you’ll die without having captured that quarry. Chase after virtue, and you are far more likely to find happiness.

2. Leave yourself wiggle room

While planning a battle, wise commanders consider the possibility of defeat and so leave room for retreat in case of disaster. In setting our ambitions, we should do the same. The man who had hopes of becoming a film star, a goal beyond reach for the vast majority of actors, would do well to consider options should he fail. He might become a director of a community theater, like one man I know, or another who settled in at a university teaching drama and directing plays.

Both were, as far as I could tell, happy with their lives.

3. Entertain multiple ambitions

So many of us are “either-or” people in our views of the world and of ourselves. We act as if our choices only consisted of two possibilities. This is bad thinking. Recently, for example, I spoke at length with a man who had adolescent dreams of being a soldier, becoming an artist, living an outdoor life, and having a family. In his younger years he several times deployed to the Middle East as an Army Ranger. Now, 40 years old, he creates and sells medieval-style manuscripts replete with curvilinear art, runs an outdoor “forest school” along with his wife, and is the father of nine children.

That man has successfully pursued his boyhood visions, but if one of those dreams had failed, he could chase after others.

4. Make your dreams your servant, not your master

In his poem “If,” Rudyard Kipling lists the character traits that make for a good man, including this wise prescription: “If you can dream—and not make dreams your master….” When we allow our dreams a throne and scepter, we risk making that end justify the means by which those dreams are achieved. We may reach our objective, but lose our soul in the journey.

Dreams pursued are never free. They require grit, perseverance, talent, and a strong grasp on reality.

And those are the jewels which give dreams their value.

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image Credit: Jesse Collins, CC BY 3.0