王俊贤 香港理工大学
A person who only knows striving is basically a cow. A person who can only dream is in a coma. Neither of them can be successful, but the one who is in a coma is still at least a human. Not striving sounds terrible, but giving up dreaming sounds even worse. But relax, ladies and gentlemen, everybody dreams. Dream here is not the sweet or bad dream you had last night. It is the kind of life you want to live. You don’t have to strive in order to dream. You spontaneously love something or someone. I don’t know what your dream is, but I do know that you have your own dream all along.
But striving isn’t like dreaming. It’s much more difficult because we, human have inertia. We prefer entertainment to work. Just hearing the word ‘strive’ makes people sweat. And even those hardworking people may not have the backbone to strive for their dream. Why? You can think of a thousand of reasons like pressure, fear, procrastination, lack of confidence and so on. But none of them is the biggest obstacle that stands between you and your dream.
Craig Valentine is a well-known public speaker in the United States. Before his career of public speaking started, he was working for a computer company. One day, he decided to quit his job. So he went into his manager’s office, looked into his eyes and said ‘John, I’m going to be leaving. It has been my dream to become a professional speaker.’ His manager said, ‘Is that your dream, Craig? I admire that you have your own dream, but you can’t leave.’
Craig was confused. ‘What do you mean by I can’t leave?’
‘Well, Craig, to be honest, we’ve been thinking of raising your salary up to this.’
Craig said ‘I appreciate that, but no matter how much you’re going to pay me, I’m going to leave. It’s a matter of dream, not money.’
‘Okay, but what about up to this?’ In fact, his manager raised his salary 4 times in that conversation. But Craig refused with ‘no, that’s about dream, not about money’. And finally, his manager said ‘How about we raise your salary way above 6 figures?’ And that’s in US dollars.
Craig hesitated, and said ‘dream, is over-rated.’
So you can see that the biggest thing that stands between you and your dream is not a bad thing. It is indeed a good thing. And the better it is, the worse it can be. Some may give up their dream for a comfortable life or settle on a well paved road that is destined far away from their dream. But Craig didn’t. He quitted his job on the very next day and ever since then, his mouth has never been stopped. It was because he knew that his dream was not for sale. His dream is not for sale and, ladies and gentlemen, so is yours.
Thank you.
