Should An Actor Dream Big?

Wow, it’s 2015! No flying cars yet but that doesn’t mean we can’t dream, right? Speaking of dreaming, if your career is not as high flying as you would like it to be, I can guarantee you that the main reason is that you are the one with the brakes on. Here are nine fun and fantastic reasons to dream big and reach your full potential.

1. The bigger the dream, the more connected it is to who you are. Big dreams are an examination of the soul. The more of you that is connected to what you want, the more likely you are to follow through.
2. Big dreams are clear dreams. To accomplish anything, you have to know what it is. Saying you want to be a working actor has no specific meaning. On the other hand, to say you want a starring role in a sci-fi adventure directed by J.J. Abrams is tangible and more importantly, actionable. If you are going to be clear, might as well be big, too.
3. People can’t help you with your dreams if you don’t share them. A successful career doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It requires a team of people helping one another. If you are helpful to others, they are going to want to help you in return. But they can’t help you if they don’t know what you want. If your career aspirations amount to “Oh geez, I don’t know,” you are missing a golden opportunity to engage others in your acting career efforts. One person can literally launch your career if you let them.
4. If you dream big you will achieve big. As far as I know, no one has ever conclusively demonstrated the limit of human potential, so only by aiming far above your perceived limits can you ever know what they really are. It’s really just a question of focus. There’s probably a reason we never heard about Beethoven bowling a perfect game—he probably never did. He was too consumed with composing the greatest musical compositions in history. He put everything he had into one thing and the results were spectacular. If you set the bar at knee level, that’s as high as you will jump. If you put it way over your head, it’s a guarantee you will jump as high as you can. And yes, the bar might fall on your head.
5. By having big dreams you will take big actions. If you play in the sandbox, a plastic shovel will do, but to move mountains you need dynamite and an earth mover.
6. Your dreams have to be as big as those of the people with whom you want to work. You want to be on television or in the movies? Guess who makes that stuff…the best producers and directors in the business. Do you think they want to work with people who are content with whatever scraps life throws at them? They want to work with people whose dreams are as big or bigger than their own.
7. Dreams are scalable. Dreaming big is no different than dreaming small. The CEO of a billion-dollar company has the same number of hours in his day as you do. They just know how to deploy resources to leverage their time. You need to understand and activate the appropriate resources to run your empire. You can’t be an expert in everything and you can’t do all the work. Recruit others into your dream. The more people you involve in your dream, the better the chance for success. Even when you feel stuck, some other part of your team will be making progress.
8. Dreaming big opens your mind. The bigger the concept, the more depth it requires. To conceive something big you need to involve more of your human capacity, which actually causes you to grow as a person. This is a perpetual cycle of positivity.
9. Bigger dreams benefit more people. You have a limitless capacity for good, why not use it all? Imagine if all the greats—Einstein, Beethoven, Picasso, Scorsese—kept their ideas and thoughts to themselves. The world would be a desert. Allow your own inner curiosity and desires to leak out into the world. You have no idea what impact you might have, not only on your own life, but in the lives of countless others.

Dreams are magical. Even more magical is the fact we can turn dreams into reality.

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