The Dichotomy of a Visionary Life

When we talk about visions and dreams is hard not to think about the story of Joseph the Dreamer, someone that was a visionary at an early age. He felt so excited about his dreams that he wanted to share them with the people he trusted, talk about them, and eventually those dreams took everything away from him except his life. He lost his friends, family, and freedom, he was taken to a foreign land, and sold as a slave. I imagine him thinking, how can I see this bright future and be slave at the same time? Why do I have these dreams if I can’t make them happen? If this is a gift, why would God show me something that I can never have? You can even think that is mean to show someone that is starving a great buffet every time he closes his eyes, but that is sometimes the reality of a dreamer. I will be honest with you, is hard to be a visionary, is hard to see what other people can’t, and it’s even harder to try and share that vision with them, because most either won’t believe or won’t understand it. And who can blame them if sometimes we don’t even believe our visions ourselves? But I bring good news, everything around us, man-made, started with a dream of a visionary just like you.

I consider myself a visionary and years have taught me, just like Joseph, that its better to keep those visions to yourself and work on them instead of talking about them. I’ve also learned how hard it is to be a visionary. In Joseph’s story, he went through a lot of pain and suffering because of it, but he never stopped dreaming, and he never stopped giving his best at everything he did. As proof, he ended up becoming the right hand of his enslaver and eventually became the second most powerful person in Egypt, one of the superpowers at the time. Let me be clear, it was not because of the dreams alone that Joseph had such success, but because he took constant action, never gave up despite his terrible situation, and performed to his best in everything he did. Imagine losing your freedom, being in a strange land, and away from friends and family, even then he never gave up, and that is one of the characteristics of a visionary. Visionaries are relentless, they never give up, their dreams and visions are the fuel that keeps them going despite of their current reality. Don’t get me wrong, visionaries have bad days too, they also feel defeated, depressed and sometimes even hopeless, because life happens to us all, but they don’t give in to the situations or their feeling, they understand that there is something bigger waiting for them at the end of that pain and that what they are living today is just temporary, and that too shall pass.

Many people would’ve given up when their own family turned against them, many people would’ve given up when they were sold as a slave and lost their freedom, but not a visionary like Joseph. A true visionary never gives up, a visionary understands that as long as they are alive, they have another chance to keep trying, to take action, to take another step, to change their current reality. Now, being a visionary is not easy, it’s tough to constantly see what could be and wake up every day to what is. It’s a blessing and a curse. It is hard to be able to see where you want to be but not how to get there. If you don’t know how to get where you want to go, then where should you take the next step? But let me tell you some good news, you don’t need to know the path, you just need take a step forward and then another, and you will eventually get somewhere. If you end up someplace you don’t want to be, just take another path, as long as you are alive, you can keep walking. Visionaries are bombarded with ideas every day; they get excited and overwhelmed because its hard not knowing how to make those ideas come true. But another good news is that the world is built on someone’s dreams. Just think about it, if you are sitting in a chair, reading this article in a computer, someone imagined that chair and that computer, they first existed in their mind, and then they were created. Everywhere you look at, someone else imagined it first, the car you drive, the road you drive on, the building you work at, everything started in the mind of a relentless dreamer. Our world is built on success stories, the fact that we have everything we have is because someone didn’t stopped working, despite every challenge he had to overcome and despite the hardships of life, he continued until he succeeded. If you are a visionary, there are success stories all around you, to inspire you, to let you know that you are not alone, that it is possible, that if you take action and don’t stop trying, you will eventually make it happen. Just like you, those successful dreamers didn’t knew what path to take, but they didn’t waited for one to be shown to them, they took action anyways and see what was at the end of every road until they found what they were looking for. This teaches us something, that as visionaries we only need two things to bring our dreams to life: relentless action and patience.

We live in world where we want everything now, we don’t like to wait, we can’t wait, we want to be fit and rich now, we want everything faster, faster internet, faster delivery services, faster shipping. We feel that life is going away, that time is against us, and we need to have everything today before it’s too late. We have lost the sense of time, so it is important to remember that nothing of meaning was created in a day, everything takes effort and continuous action overtime. If life is a journey, everywhere you want to go will be one step at a time, even if you think you are taking a short cut, you still have to take it a step at a time. So, patience is key, every action you take will eventually bring you a result, it might not be the result you wanted, sometimes will be better than you expected, sometimes not so good, but you can always keep taking action until you get what you are looking for.

So as a conclusion, I don’t have the answers, I’m also trying to figure out life, but we can’t stand idle until we have all the answer because we might never have them. We must take action now, we may never know if we are going in the right direction but let’s take the step and find out what is at the end of the road, we can always take another path. What is the alternative? Sit and wait until we feel ready? The world is constantly changing around us, we will never feel ready, we will never have all the information we think we need, but we have a responsibility to bring those visions to life, someone put them there for a reason, and it was not to bring you pain, but to bring value to the rest of us. The great inventions of our time were brought to us by “crazy” dreamers who didn’t care what other people thought about their ideas and did it anyways, we have plenty of examples: Henry Ford, the Wright Brothers, Nikola Tesla, Von Braun, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, just to name a few. Every day we are given another chance to keep trying, to build our life, to build our future, to change what we think needs to be change, to be happy, to give back, to love and be loved.