The man leaned out of the limousine window and called up to Julia Roberts on the fire escape:
“What’s your dream? Everybody comes to Hollywood…got a dream.”
I was standing in front of the Capitol Records building a few weeks ago. A friend’s birthday brunch in downtown LA, the Hollywood sign visible in the distance behind us, cameras out. And that line just rose up in me.
I moved to Los Angeles from Northern California when I was 18. I had a dream: get my degree in speech communications, go to the beach as much as possible, write a book someday, and then move back home. That was the whole plan.
Here’s what actually happened.
I got the degree. I did write the book, much later than I planned, and it changed everything. I never moved back, because my husband had built his business here and was planted, and eventually so was I. My next dream was a family. We built that too: two boys who are now grown men, and a house where everyone wanted to come over, where we needed two refrigerators because there were always kids eating in our kitchen. Those kids are still part of our family.
I had a dream of leaving PR and becoming a coach. I became a Master Coach. I get to help people uncover who they are, what they’re built to do, and how to get there and I can’t imagine doing anything else.
I had a dream of being like Dear Abby, having people write to me with their problems and answering them in print. I did that. I had a column: Have a Question, Ask Gretchen. And here’s what I found out: I didn’t love it the way I thought I would. But I tried it. And trying it told me something true about myself.
I had a dream of staying married. So far so good, a few bumps in the road, but still here.
I had a dream of becoming a speaker. I’ve done that, and I like it. Hopefully more to come.
You don’t have to have just one dream.
You can have a dream for a season, take real action on it, and then find out whether it fits. Some dreams are life-defining. Some are a chapter. Some teach you what you don’t want, which is its own kind of clarity.
One of the things I love about Los Angeles, even the gritty, traffic-jammed, street sign-faded parts of it, is that the streets are paved with gold. The gold of possibility. People come here from everywhere to become something. In other places, the culture might not hold space for that kind of reaching. Here, you can be a waiter by day and a musician by night. You can be a writer and still work your corporate job. You can be 18 and drive down from Northern California with a plan that doesn’t work out the way you drew it and end up with something better than you could have imagined.
Dreams don’t always come with flashing lights and a billboard on Sunset. Sometimes they’re quieter than that. More internal. More about who you’re becoming than what you’re doing.
Last month, four astronauts launched aboard Artemis II, the first humans to travel beyond Earth’s orbit in over fifty years. They didn’t get there on ambition alone. That mission required thousands of people working toward a vision for decades, a launch system tested and rebuilt, and four individuals who trained for years for a trip that would last ten days. They didn’t wish their way to the Moon. They worked their way there.
Your dream works the same way.
Four Questions to Find Your Dream
If you’re not sure what yours is, or you’ve let yourself stop thinking about it, start here:
1. What would you regret not doing? If you were at the end of your life looking back, is there something sitting there, unstarted, unfinished? Pay attention to that. It’s not nothing.
2. What did you want before the world told you what to want? Before money mattered, before responsibilities, before anyone else had opinions about your life, what did you want to be? Dreams are often embedded in us from the beginning. They don’t always disappear. They just get buried.
3. What comes naturally to you? What do you do better than most people without trying? What do people come to you for? Gifts aren’t accidents.
4. What pulls at you even though it scares you a little? Nervousness and excitement feel almost identical. Don’t confuse fear with a stop sign.
Dreams come in all shapes and sizes. Some are life-changing. Some are a passing phase. But all of them deserve to be discovered. And discovery requires action, discipline, follow-through, the willingness to try something and find out the truth of it. Dreams don’t just happen.
“What’s your dream? Everybody…got a dream.”
You do. Even if you’ve let the light go quiet on it. Even if it’s been a while since you let yourself say it out loud.
What’s yours?
Much love,
Gretchen
What’s your dream — the one you haven’t said out loud yet? Hit reply. I read every one.
