"My goal is to be a rock star. And my backup to be be an astronaut"

Reality should never be be the enemy of dreams

Yesterday I stumbled across the listing of a 15 year old boy on the website of a US adoption agency. The description stated that his "vocational goal is to be a rock star, but his backup plan is to be an astronaut." 

I read it again. Slowly. All night and all day long now his words have been playing over and over upon my mind. It gave me several emotions from sadness to excitement. But more than anything else I felt deeply pleased to hear those words. I recognized the language of big dreams. And the language of dreams is spoken by the rarest of men. In fact, the language of dreams is often spoken most fluently by the young. And we should listen to that voice as often as it is heard - for it is the voice that shapes the future.

Once upon a time almost all of us had big dreams. Fireman, pilot or astronaut - there was a time that you and I had every conviction that this dream would become reality one day. But as the years pass, things change. Surrounded by the examples of men who have given up before reaching their goals, we start to water down our dreams. Diminishing our goals. Miniaturizing our beliefs. We grow older and more cautious. We listen with close attention to the caring voices of those who had long since abandoned their own hopes.

They who show themselves so helpful to protect us against disappointment and disillusionment by cautiously reminding us to rather pick more reasonable dreams. Achievable ones. Sensible dreams that will more properly fit into the moulds of mediocrity. "Your dreams are false," they argue. "They are not real," they whisper. Those are the voices we hear the most. And in time, those are the voices we end up believing.

There is a story about diamonds that I was once told. It was about a man who grew up on the border of Lesotho. Over the years, the mountain inhabitants often brought brilliant stones from the mountain streams to his family - believing that they were diamonds. His father knew that diamonds were harder than almost anything. And so, to test whether they were real or not, he used to smack them with a hammer. In this manner, without fail, every single stone was crushed to powder.

Only many years later, when this boy saw some of the most exquisite diamonds in South Africa coming from those same mountains, did he realize that many of those diamonds had probably been real. For hard though they may be, even diamonds shatter between the cold steel of a hammer and the hard iron of an anvil.

This to me, is how it often is when seemingly unlikely dreams are shattered beneath the deadly hammers of preconception. And so, one by one, most people end up dropping the diamonds of their dreams into the molten lava of disbelief. Just as if someone had convinced us them that they were in actual fact never real diamonds, but merely ordinary fragments of glass. I could not help but wonder how many good dreams have been  lost in this way across the ages? It must be millions without number.

At what point then, do most of us abandon our dreams? At what point do we believe the voices that tell us to walk away from dreams that are too big? For example, one must grant that indeed, the odds of actually becoming an astronaut are small. Some might say minuscule. I believe that the odds of becoming an astronaut are 1 in 320 million. These odds are very nearly the same as winning the California lottery.

But as we all know - more new astronauts go to space every year. And somebody wins the lottery all the time - however small the chances. Clearly there are always those who dream about seemingly impossible things, who nevertheless still attain them in life.

I know of one such man. The biggest dreamer of them all. And the owner of more diamonds than anybody who had ever lived until his time. Some thought of him as the king of diamonds. But I think of him as the king of dreams. He it was, who used to say, "I measure a man by the size of his dream." I would take those words seriously from a person who started with nothing and made himself into one of the richest men in the world.


"I dream in continents," he told his friends. And that, indeed, he did. Quite literally so.

To those who knew him well enough, Rhodes was a scoundrel by every unit of measure. But he also set the benchmark for marrying unlikely dreams with ultimate reality. However lacking his character might have been at times, there is a lot that we can learn from his spirit.

Cecil John Rhodes - one of the biggest and most successful dreamers who ever lived.

Like so many other great men, he had a humble origin. Cecil Rhodes began his life as the somewhat sickly son of a British parson. He came from the bottom end of a large family. He was not an overly gifted scholar. He did not really excel at sport. And even his social skills were limited, for he he had a squeaky, almost girlish voice. Neither did he come from wealth or class. In fact, his life seemed destined to mediocrity.

He was already flowing into the mould of ensured social insignificance, but for one important thing that happened to him. His doctors advised him for the sake of his health to relocate to South Africa. And so it was decided to send him to the other side of the world in order to attempt to prolong his life.

In 1871 he arrived in South Africa. He was, as one author described him, "a tall, lanky, anaemic, fair-haired boy, shy and reserved in bearing." And he was still a mere boy of only 17 years old. To all reasonable expectations, young Cecil should have had a life of perfect insignificance. In fact, the farming venture that he attempted with his brother soon turned into failure.

But in this fateful decade South Africa had become the country of dreams. To dreamers and adventurers around the world, this was the land of golden opportunity. A land of mineral rushes unlike any the world had ever known. And it was one of the fewest places on earth where a nobody could have the hope of becoming a somebody with just a little bit  of luck and a lot of hard work.

Young Cecil's experienced many serious setbacks. But he never gave up trying. His wanderings eventually lead him to the diamond rush of Kimberley. In stead of finding rivers of diamonds here, he discovered thousands of men who already had a head start on him. Men much cleverer than he. Much older and stronger. Vastly more experienced. Far better equipped to survive and prosper in a cruel world where one man would step onto his neighbour just as sure as a hungry dog would eat another. What mattered most, however, was that Cecil had one thing that was bigger than any other man - the size of his dreams.

What followed in Cecil's life reads like a story book. In his relatively short life, the unassuming boy from Hertfordshire consolidated the mad world of Kimberley into the biggest diamond company in the history of the world. He founded and directed one of the greatest gold mines on the planet - still producing gold over 120 years later. He even had a country named after him. He floated companies, founded industries, determined the course of history, and either built or destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of men, women and children.

He, who had no special education, went on to obtain an Oxford degree. He then became the Prime Minister of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope. He became the friend of monarchs and the partner of international bankers. These achievements would have satisfied even the most ambitious men. But Rhodes' dreams were bigger yet. All of these were merely stepping stones on the way to his real dream: that of building a railway from the Cape to Cairo - and then to go on to unify the entire English-speaking world into one great empire. And after that, his dream was to unite the world under the British flag.

In fact, these were not just fantasies. To Rhodes they were real. Because, as he once told his friends, his dreams are backed with plans. "There is a difference," he insisted.

It is an irony of history that Rhodes did not live to realize his ultimate dreams. But it did not matter. He came further than much more talented men could have reached in generations. He, who had once been given only 6 months to live, died at the age of 48. His dying words were, "so little done. So much to do."

There are many reasons why Rhodes came so far in life. But in my mind, one of the most important was the fact that he dreamed bigger than all, and remained child enough to believe in the reality of every one of his dreams.

Mark Twain once said that where Cecil Rhodes stood in the Cape, his shadow fell across the Zambezi

Rhodes had been brought up to become a parson like his father. Or a barrister, if his mother had allowed it. But destiny pointed him onto a different road. On that road, Rhodes ignored small ambitions. He paid attainable goals little attention. In stead, he chose only the biggest of dreams, and never allowed himself to be convinced that they were impossible to reach. He never tested diamonds with a hammer. He tested them with light - and if they sparkled - he kept them for his treasure.

Lesser men would have kept their dreams private, for fear that others would laugh at their size. But not Rhodes. Just as he was never shy to show his treasure of diamonds, he was never shy to share his dreams with anyone would might admire their glitter. And indeed, many a friend did tell him that his dreams were unrealistic. That someone in his position had no hope of reaching them. Rhodes did not listen to small men. And he never allowed the voices of doubt to cloud the light of his dreams.

And so I think back at the boy who would be a rock star. I may never meet him. But we all meet boys and girls who are like him. For my part, I choose to believe that boy will become a rock star. And if not a rock star, then an astronaut. And if not an astronaut, then I hope that he will still reach whatever dream he sets his mind to. Because dreams are the reflection of reality to those who have the faith to believe in them.

My choice does not have to be a rational one. I'm a believer in dreams. We dreamers speak differently.

Credits: 
All images by courtesy of Wikipedia
Astronaut image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f9/CecilRhodes.jpg/170px-CecilRhodes.jpg
Portrait of Rhodes: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ec/Punch_Rhodes_Colossus.png/170px-Punch_Rhodes_Colossus.png
Rhodes the Colossus: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/88/Astronaut-EVA.jpg/250px-Astronaut-EVA.jpg