Want to be fulfilled? Just build the field of your dreams
To build a dream – any dream – or to excel in your hustle, a man should have inner ears to distinctly discern voices that others cannot hear.
In the 1989 movie, Field of Dreams, Ray Kinsella – played by Kevin Costner – hears a strange whisper while wandering in a corn field: “If you build it, he will come.”
But what’s Ray supposed to build in a corn field? And who is this who will come if Ray builds this thing? The “it” was a baseball field. And the “he” were baseball players.
Back in the day, when we were setting up our second-hand clothes business, we often joked that, to do business, one had to be borderline insane, or chuck out all reason out of the window.
“Bro, we’re mad!” we would say.
“I know,” someone would say.
“Imagine we just woke up one morning, built stalls, went to Gikomba Market to buy mtush ...”
“And paid someone in Gikomba to iron the clothes we bought,” someone else said.
“Then we came to our stalls, hang them and put prices on each item, yet nobody even gave us one order!”
To build a dream – any dream – or to excel in your hustle, a man should have inner ears to distinctly discern voices that others cannot hear. If you wait for confirmation from others, you will wait till kingdom come.
Great entrepreneurs who built business empires from the ground up often heard voices that others could not hear. The flipside of hearing is trusting. Man, trust your gut instinct. Guard that voice like you would a treasure trove, lest it be robbed by doubts and fears.
To be first among your peers, a man should be bold enough to do crazy things. Like, for instance, build a baseball field in a corn field. Dreams are personal affairs. It may not make sense when you are starting, but, trust me, in the long run, it will.
When you decide to soar where eagles dare, you will be bombarded by questions from within and without. “Will this even succeed?” “Are you sure you have thought this thing through?” “No one in your family has ever played baseball, and now you are building a baseball field?”
Here’s what I found out. Sometimes it is alright to honestly answer: “I don’t know. For now, I don’t have all the answers. But there is a drive deep inside me that is so strong, which is telling me to do this.” But the best way to silence those voices is to act. Throw the chips – get them out of your hands - and let them land where they will.
After we set up our mitumba business, customers came. They were there all along, but, until we took a leap of faith, they just remained as potential customers. We could only exploit – and explore - this potential if we acted.
My friends and I learnt that, if we would have waited for customers to give us orders before we started, we would never do the most important thing anyone pursuing a dream must do; start. Start however. Start small. Start alone. Start afraid. Start amidst the audience’s derision and laughter.
It may take a minute, but the people who are supposed to support your dream will come through. In that minute, there will be doubts. To silence doubt, replay the voice you heard and allow its empowering nature to inject your faith with vitamins.
If a man does not build the field of his dreams, he will live an unfulfilled existence. It’s when a man is pursuing an impossible dream that he feels most alive, and he will throw away his warm blankets and rush into the cold July morning to be on his purpose.
