Friday, February 17, 2012

Don't Follow Your Dreams

I am not into the peppy advice, but I thought the following, at the end of a very long series of questions was interesting.

The question asked of Mark Cuban boiled down to:  I want to be in X.  It is my dream.  Should I follow my dream?


The answer:
Never follow your dreams. Follow your effort. It’s not about what you can dream of. That’s easy. It’s about whether or not it’s important enough to you to do the work to be ready to be successful in that business. "Never follow Your Dreams": Mark Cuban answers your question, Freakonomics 3 February 2011

2 comments:

Sue Frelick said...

'Follow your effort.' I never thought of living that way. Guess I fell into the 'follow your dreams' way of thinking. Thanks for giving me something to think about.

russell1200 said...

Mark Cuban is notoriously blunt. On the plus side he does not dodge the difficult questions.

I overheard a conversation today, a young lady, who was taking marine biology classes at the local university, was talking about how she really wanted to be in a band. Given the oddly unspecific way she mentioned it, I doubted she had much effort involved (other than clothes styling) involved in either effort.

When I commented on it later to someone, and noted that marine biology is not as excitingwatchingc Jacque Cousteau on T.V., they said "well why shouldn't she be a marine biologist, you read up on all sorts of different things?" My answer: "I read all the time, I read through all sorts of different difficultfult texts. But if you have never cracked a book out side of what was needed to pass your 9th grade Social Studies text, and then your reading aobut about marine biology is as a freshman in college, you are going to be blown away. There is no reason you couldn't learn it, but you are really going to have to want it, you will have to have real drive. If your parents mention to passing acquaintances how you are studying marine biology, and the first words out of your mouth are vague expressions of how you would like to be in a band....You aren't likely to succeed at either endeavor."