What is your dream?
Dream [dreem] – an aspiration; goal; aim – Dictionary.com
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about this recently, because quite frankly I haven’t a clue what it is that keeps me going some days. I was reading a blog post over on erica.biz about why people don’t save for retirement. She (Erica, I presume) spent some time talking about why people put off saving for the future, because to them the now is something that is tangible, while tomorrow isn’t something people can’t always seem to grasp. Or, at least that’s the lesson I took from the post, even if she was getting at something else.
It got me thinking about two things, really. The first thing is that people need to figure out exactly what is getting them up in the morning – what is their dream? I’m not talking about goals, I’m talking about that big vision for the future. Unfortunately, I don’t have a good idea in my mind of what that is for me personally – one of my personal goals for writing this blog is to figure that out. I have this sinking suspicion that determining what that dream is will be a big part of the “get happy” I was thinking about when I named this site. I’m sure I will be devoting a good deal of my time here on that subject in the future. What I do know is that retirement isn’t it.
The other thing it got me thinking about is perhaps a bit more shocking. I think people need to stop saving for retirement.
Now, before you go jumping down my throat about this, let me be clear. I’m not talking about not contributing to your 401k, stopping your IRA contributions, or anything crazy like that. I’m just saying retirement isn’t my dream, and honestly, I doubt it is yours either, so don’t bother saving for it. Instead, use those same vehicles (and probably the same, if not greater contributions) to save for your dream, whatever that may be. Of course, if it turns out your dream is something so radically different that those ‘retirement’ tools can’t be massaged to help you get where you want to be, then figure out some other way to get there.
Ok, so back to Erica’s blog post. Honestly, visualizing my retirement isn’t something that is really all that useful to me, but I hope that if I refocus it on my dream I will be able to figure out what exactly it is. Of course, maybe I’m over-reaching, and I should be focusing more on my near-term goals (mini-dreams, maybe? I think of goals as things that are easier to obtain than dreams…). What do you think?
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So, you want to know what's up with the brackets in the name? "Curly brackets (also called braces, or "squiggly brackets") are sometimes used in prose to indicate a series of equal choices" and "Square brackets are mainly used to enclose explanatory or missing material usually added by someone other than the original author, especially in quoted text." So basically, if you really want to be wealthy in life, you have to figure out how to get happy. Since that whole spiel would make a crappy name for a blog, I decided to do something a bit creative with some brackets.
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