This is a scene from "The Wire" where the young detective Herc is disappointed to find out he needs to sit for hours and monitor a pay phone. Lester Freamon tells the younger detective: "This right here, this is the job. Now when you came downtown to CID, what kind of work were you expecting?"

I think that is a great question to ask ourselves when thinking about dreams. I use it as a sort of quick test to see if I am fantasizing about something that I actually wouldn’t want. It is about turning the dream into what “the job” would be, and start doing that. Here is an example:

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1. What does the dream life consist of in terms of daily actions?

Let’s say I would want to become a writer.

What does a writer do? The answer is simple, they sit down every day and write. This is open to anyone. All you need is 30 minutes (or whatever one can manage) to sit down and write.

That would be the job

2. Doing the actual stuff

When doing this thing, check how I like it.

Those 30 minutes that I take to write, do I look forward to it? If those 30 minutes are the prime time of the day, the time when I feel that things are flowing, then that is a good sign. But if I don't like it, that means there is something wrong with my dream. Does not mean necessarily that the whole dream is wrong, might be something with how I approach writing.

The basic thing is though, if you want to be a writer, you have to like the act of writing.

3. Ignoring outcomes

If my dream is dependent on being successful, it's a bad dream.

It is good to aim high, but there is no way to know in advance if I am right. I can’t know if what I am doing will be successful. And even if I am successful, I still have to write. But, If I already like to write I will win no matter what, because the reward is all about doing the job. When Richard Feynman first got the call from the Nobel prize committee he hung up, his wife had to talk him into going there and accepting the award. For him, all the reward was in doing physics, not getting some prize from a committee.

In conclusion, translate dreams into daily actions. Do the daily actions for a week and see how you like it. Think about how the actions and behaviour feel, with no regard for the outcome. If you like them in themselves, you will win no matter what.

This is incidentally how I know I have to play music for the rest of my life. I can never get enough of sitting down at a piano and learning new things. If I can do that, I feel successful.

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