the dreamer
and the anti dreamer. ugh.
Failure is what exactly?
Why did we love watching those epic fail videos in middle school?
Why do we cook failure up into this massive thing to be afraid of?
Most people have a broken relationship with failure, and I’m here to address that today.
The only thing to be afraid of is not trying at all.
The enemy is the mind of doubt, defeat, and pessimism.
People love to be right.
They love to see you fail.
It’s probably why we loved those epic fail vids growing up.
Yes they’re properly hilarious, (or at least they were in 2013).
But subconsciously, they made us feel better about ourselves.
It’s easier to feel good about doing nothing with your life when you’re watching people eat it trying to do something with theirs
It was funny then—but now it’s apparent we have a disease:
Failure aversion.
We’d rather be right than actually try.
Failure hurts so bad that we avoid it entirely.
Whenever someone messes up, people pull out their phones—not to help—but to document it.
Because our culture feeds on failure.
The judgment nurses the ego artificially and preserves an air of rightness—even though they’re doing absolutely nothing.
It’s easier to comment from the sidelines than actually play the game.
Most people would rather get off to being right than actually live a real life.
Because it’s easier to expose everyone else’s problems than deal with our own.
It’s easier to shoot down their dreams than think about yours.
It’s easier to doubt it’ll ever work than actually do something about it.
It’s a self-perpetuating cycle.
And the only way to break it is to just fail.
My dad just wrote an essay this morning.
How he has all these dreams..
And how his wife tends to shoot them down like clay pigeons.
He was having fun with it. It was funny.
Of course he had to back it up after laying out his wife like that.
So he explains how she was usually right..
And how most of the dreams he’s tried haven’t worked,
They’ve just been expensive.
And that was pretty much the end of that.
And it was a cute essay.
Dad the happy dreamer,
Mom, the anti-dreamer, the realistic one, who’s actually right in the end.
So we can give her credit—she’s right after all.
And that’s what’s so screwed up.
It’s not the judgment I have a problem with.
Jesus tells us to expect judgments and trials of various kinds—the enemy will see our light, be exposed, and wish with everything inside to put that light out—and will use any means to do so.
I expect the judgment.
It’s the mindset running behind the judgment that is truly depressing.
I’m going to dive into this with a lot of frustration because this one’s been cooking for decades across generations.
See, the doubter is usually right.
Most things you try will fail.
But the dumb part is when you go from
Being honest — “these will probably fail”
To being miserable — “so I’m not even going to try.”
There are people who hate when things don’t work out the way they expect, and live their lives in aversion to such disappointment.
And there are those who love doing what they love, and are ok with the inevitable hardships that come along the way, because they understand that it’s just part of the process.
Aka they don’t let failure deter them. They have a strong cocktail of optimism (often blind), courage, and persistence. They’re not afraid to try, again and again. They don’t assume they know until they’ve tried. They don’t get too disappointed by failure.
They have a different relationship to failure.
Their noise to experience ratio is different. (Think about this and let me know your thoughts. I don’t have a full picture of this but there’s something here).
That’s why the essay bothered me so much—not because mom doubts whether it’ll work—everyone doubts whether it’ll work.
It’s not trying because you’re scared it’ll fail.
Not trying because you don’t know how it’ll turn out.
Not trying because you’re scared of being seen starting small.
And doubters are right 99% of the time.
99% of the time, the business will fail, the relationship won’t work.
But the 1% of the time it actually matters, they’re wrong.
And so if you listen to them for the 99%, you miss out on the 1% that will change your life forever. Then you resent them for the 1% you forfeited on their account.
If you listen to doubt that’s right 99% of the time—you miss the 1 shot that would’ve changed everything.
The problem is, you don’t know which shot that is, or when it’s coming, you just have to take courage and trust.
Most people let fear run their lives because they cannot manage their minds.
They can’t stand the prospect of failure, so they spend their whole lives architecting things for safety.
And in the process, they miss out on the small failures and make the ultimate failure.
The ultimate failure isn’t “failing,” it’s not trying to begin with. It’s quitting too early. It’s being realistic. It’s setting “more attainable” dreams.
The only real failure happens when you stop trying. When you stop dreaming. When you stop looking, wondering, standing in awe, getting excited about life, dreaming up wild, audacious, humongous dreams, and then getting after them with ferocious intent.
That’s what makes me sad about this story: We’ve conceded a credit to the skeptical sideline commentators because they’re right 99% of the time. And this just incentivizes more people to run their righteous mouths on the sidelines instead of actually doing anything of real importance. (What else are you going to do with your time?)
How do they have all this time to shoot down other people’s dreams??
Because they’re not busy building their own.
They’re scared, so they spend all their time overthinking, blaming, judging, and comparing themselves and everyone around them because they’re trapped in an idealogical pride that didn’t turn out the way they expected. Now they have to scramble to bend reality to fit their small, fixed mindset.
These commentators spend their whole lives building the appearance of success, keeping the tradition, making their parents proud, avoiding the failures that would be embarrassing—and they end up being the miserable 40-50 year old adults facing a midlife crisis because they realize everything they built their life on was a story, an illusion, a lie, a badge of honor.
A token of success, without the vitality of real living.
If anyone tries to pursue a dream around them, they quickly shoot it down because they can’t stand it.
They must suppress dreams.
Light exposes darkness.
Darkness hates it.
Darkness can’t stand light.
Fear can’t stand faith.
Pessimism can’t stand optimism.
Small minded people become small people.
They can’t stand dreamers.
So one has to shoot down another’s dreams and stand in their righteous mind of being “correctness” in order to cover up and protect the gaping void of dreams that have been overshadowed by fear, shame, guilt, and avoidance.
Ugh. I’d like to swear now.
Let me be clear:
I’m not judging the person, but the mindset behind the person that is keeping them small.
I’m actually heartbroken and pissed off a the same time, because this has been a generational pattern in my family. My uncle faced it with my grandparents—he ended up listening to them—and by the tone of a late night conversation by the fire, I could tell he regretted it. Now of course you can’t tell your parents you resent them for telling you to live a normal, safe life; you can’t tell the world that thinks you’re successful that you actually regret your life—because that would make you wrong.
We’re so obsessed with being seen as “right” that we can’t be wrong, which in turn keeps us stuck doing the same things, listening to the same voices, looking for the same information to align with our previous conclusions.
We’re so scared of being bad that we never become good.
We get so zoomed in on how they see us in this season of struggle—and then we make decisions to appear “right” — to protect ourselves — instead of actually getting it right — which can only happen by doing the hard thing and getting it wrong enough times to actually learn from your mistakes.
“You’re not good because you’re unwilling to be bad” — Alex Hormozi.
“Don’t major in the minor” — Jim Rohn
I’m allergic to people who constantly have to be right.
Because they can’t see the bigger picture.
They avoid failure to appear successful.
They box themselves into an idea of themselves,
They get off to this idea of themselves with words, badges, and possessions.
And they become a slave to that voice in the mirror.
The enemy comes to steal, kill, and destroy.
Anti-dreamers will only steal, kill, and destroy dreams — because they can’t stand them. It’s impossible for them to be in the dark and the light at the same time.
They refuse to be exposed, to be vulnerable, to be wrong, to be seen failing.
So they make the ultimate failure: Not trying at all.
And yeah, anti dreamers are right in the short term. They’re right 99% of the time.
But over a long enough time horizon, they’re critically wrong.
With a long enough time horizon, the impossible becomes possible.
You do hit that 1%. It just takes working your way through the 99% failures where you’re getting the experience and knowledge to actually make that 1% shot. And when you do, suddenly all the anti-dreamers “always knew you could do it.” Because they’re living in a world of rights and wrongs, lefts and rights, conservatives and liberals, democrats and republicans, failures and successes.
They’re so convinced by what they see that they miss the actual point:
It’s not about how many times you get it wrong.
It’s about how many times you’re willing to get it wrong in order to get it right.
And that requires the stuff of courage, patience, persistence, curiosity, and excellence.
And it’s something that less that 1% truly possess. Not because that <1% are somehow morally superior, but because so few are willing to just fail.
The process is invisible.
The ways of God are intangible.
Holy Spirit moves in the inaudible.
You have to look and see something different.
You have to pay attention to see anything at all.
Pull your head outside of itself.
Shut up and be humble.
Stop thinking you know
When you haven’t even tried.
Dream an audacious dream.
Fail at it a hundred times.
Work for it.
Believe for it.
Fight for it.
And it will happen.
It may not be what you expect.
It might be off menu and off timeline.
But your commentators will shut up and praise you.
They’ll think it was you.
And you’ll redirect them to how God worked when they weren’t paying attention.
Because man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks upon the heart.
That’s about all I have to say about that.
Make more mistakes.
—Dittmar