Follow your dreams, slowly

Follow your dreams – the nafforism that launched a thousand soft-focus Instagram posts and made a million people feel bad about themselves.

There is a core of truth to it though. Given all the meandering paths and turning points that make up a life, it is tragic not to at least try to move in the direction of your dreams. One day too soon, we will be dead. So why do we persevere with things that suck our soul? If you must do the job, then fair enough. But if the motivation is to save up for a bigger car and a new telly, I think you're mad. If your house burned down today, how much stuff would you bother paying to replace?

So I am in the 'follow your dreams' camp. But I urge pragmatic dreaming. I'm wary of the relentless positivity myth that peddles the dogma of 'everything you want to achieve is possible! You too can be extraordinary!' It is often preached from an altar of privilege and therefore not very helpful at all.

If you are considering a significant shift towards doing something you love, I recommend you keep it as a hobby for as long as possible. Start small and build your expertise rather than quitting your life and leaping in at the deep end. I have written about my own decision to step off the career conveyor belt, to turn down Mr Walker's job offer and try to cycle around the world instead. But that skipped the previous years I had spent accidentally gathering momentum. The school camping trips, the bookshelves of expedition literature, the adventures in my university holidays, the mountain marathons and the weekends training with the Territorial Army. It took me years before I was ready to leap. 
Keep your day job. Pay the bills. Fill what free time remains with following your dreams. You could do a thousand press-ups a year simply by getting up a minute earlier each morning and boshing out three a day. The standard British worker has 112 days off each year. 
If you work a 40-hour week, that leaves 128 hours spare, if only in theory. You could listen to the War and Peace audiobook twice in that time. Use your evenings and weekends to write a book, tweak a recipe, keep your bees. Start making, doing and learning. One day you might earn a little bit of money from it. Then repeat the whole process, but better. 

When you get so busy that you haven't been to sleep for a week, consider decreasing your work hours a little. The squeeze should hurt you but not break you. This is your livelihood and future security we're talking about. Be wary of hurling it up in the air on the encouragement of the social media 'follow your dreams' candyfloss. Only once you are in a financial position to be able to survive on your new income would I encourage you to ditch the day job and go full time on working at your dreams. It takes a long time to become an overnight success. 

And then, once the safety net and the veneer of respectability of the day job has gone, the real hard work can begin.

OVER TO YOU:
What should you work on more slowly than your impatient side wants you to?