All my life I have had a natural tendency to dream about the future, about what could be. I also like to strategize about what it would take to get there and most of my life growing up I was told to get my head out of the clouds and get to work. It happened in school, at home and as a teen it even happened at work. Now I know this sounds bad and maybe you can here the, "Poor is me" fiddle playing but it's not. The truth was that I didn't perform well as a kid growing up. I didn't get my homework done, I didn't get my chores done and I didn't always do well at my job early in life, unless it meant talking to people. That was always something I had no trouble in producing.
The problem was that well meaning people around me tried to motivate me to be productive and do what I needed to do by inferring that my dreaming and planning wasn't productive or valuable. They didn't see the benefit to what was going on in my head and consequently neither did I.
While I was maturing in life I was naturally drawn to dreaming and building things. It was a hobby, an outlet and often a distraction. I continued to here the message, "get your head out of the clouds and get your feet on the ground" until I was about 30 years old when a friend heard someone say it to me and stopped us all dead in our tracks.
What he said to me that day is at the core of who I am and how I look at the world, "Keep your head in the clouds but keep your feet on the ground." That's right, it seems like a paradox but that paradox gave me a since of freedom that day but I didn't understand how to make it happen. I just knew that it was important and that was the day I was introduced to the idea that BOTH dreaming and the practical are both valuable. Today I have learned that I can see from the vantage point of the clouds while getting things done on the ground.
Do you know the importance of both? Can you hold this paradox?
