INTRODUCTION

I sincerely doubt that anyone who knew me as a child or even a teenager would classify me as a dreamer. I certainly didn’t see myself as one.

The oldest of four children, I grew up in San Jose, California, long before San Jose was Silicon Valley. At age eighteen, I enrolled in college with plans to major in music but with no real sense of what I would do after graduation, other than anticipating I would eventually marry and have children.

By the time I graduated nine years later (I’d left school for three years to make money and do missionary work in South America) I had married. Upon graduation, and two years into our marriage, my husband and I moved to New York City so he could study molecular biology at Columbia University. Because his PhD program was going to take five to seven years and provided only a small stipend, I had to earn a living. I decided I wanted to do that as a professional, working in an office. There was just one problem: I had no business experience. Being a twenty-seven-year-old woman with little more than an undergraduate degree in music, I pursued work as a secretary. After about a month of looking, I landed a job as a sales assistant to a retail broker at Smith Barney.

Although I now had a job, I still didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. Yet, as I watched the Ivy League–trained professionals I worked with, most of whom were hugely successful men, they didn’t seem any smarter than I was. I wanted to do what they were doing. If I had to work, I wanted a real job, a career—one that was challenging and lucrative. “I may not have a degree from Princeton, and I may not be an engineer, but I can be successful on Wall Street,” I told myself.

THE GATEKEEPER OF YOUR DREAMS

When I was an undergraduate, I attended an information session about law school. I was intrigued by a law degree, but dismissed it as a pipe dream. I wasn’t sure I was smart enough or that it was my right to even try.

There are many reasons why people don’t dare to dream. When I was in college, my parents were still the gatekeepers of my dreams; they told me what I could or couldn’t do, including weighing in on who I should marry. By age twenty-seven, I was the gatekeeper of my dreams. Being thrown into a vibrant new place (New York City) and having a supportive husband enabled me to see myself in a different context; but perhaps the most powerful motivator was that there was a pressing need. With my husband’s graduate studies and post-doctoral work expected to last at least a decade, low-paying secretarial work would have us living at the poverty level until our late thirties.

Those first steps along the path to my first big career dream were rocky. Without the skills, a relevant degree, or, most importantly, confidence, I was starting from behind. But I threw myself into my sales assistant job, took business courses at night, and in early 1992, three years after arriving in New York, my big break came. I was working at Nomura Securities, and my boss, Cesar Baez, promoted me to investment banking analyst. He took a chance and bridged for me what is often an unbridgeable divide between secretary and professional.

After a seven-year stint in banking, and the birth of our first child, I moved to sell-side research, first at Salomon Smith Barney then at Merrill Lynch. As a sell-side research analyst, I built detailed financial-valuation models, crafted investment theses, and made stock calls. When I took a sabbatical from Wall Street in order to pursue new dreams, I was widely considered to be an expert on the stocks under my coverage, and I had earned a double ranking in the Institutional Investor survey, a poll conducted among the world’s largest professional money managers; I was rated number one in Latin American media and number two in Latin American telecoms.

THE POWER OF SHARING

After daring and dreaming for more than a decade in New York, we moved to Boston for my husband’s work, and I began to see that dreaming is a process. I came to recognize that achieving goals isn’t as much about gaining credentials or training as it is believing in possibilities and being in a place where you can explore possibilities. I also confirmed that necessity is the mother of invention.

To my surprise, when I asked women what they dreamed of doing, many responded, “I don’t have a dream” or “I don’t know that my dreams are within reach.” Many felt that it wasn’t their privilege to dream. This concerned me. These were highly educated, eminently capable women who are the bedrock of our society. I saw so many possibilities for these women. I knew I had to do something—and that something was creating the Dare to Dream blog (daretodream.typepad.com) a safe spare where intelligent, articulate women could explore their dormant dreams.

DREAMS OF ANY SHAPE AND SIZE

Maybe your dream is to marry a good man and raise a happy family, or to become a doctor, an artist, a teacher, to run your own business. Perhaps your dream will be to run a marathon, learn to knit, sing in public, or run for political office. Maybe it’s to make your corner of the world one where everyone wants to be. Whether you are pursuing one dream or many, are still discovering your dreams, or are just beginning to explore what it means to dream, I hope this book will be an inspiration and a guide.

Dare,Dream,Do is divided into three parts:

Interwoven into the narrative are the stories of dozens of women; many of these women, ranging in age from twenty to seventy, initially shared their stories on the Dare to Dream blog. As I dared these women to grapple with the why, what, and how of their dreams, the richness of our Dare to Dream conversation increased exponentially. I learned that most of us don’t dream well in isolation. Because the skills women bring to family, civic, and professional life are often intangible or overlooked, we need others to help us recognize what we’re doing and give our dreams life. My friend Jen Thomas described her experience of reading this book on a flight, “Reading this manuscript (somewhere over Missouri) magically changed my solitary seat of 22B, into a room full of intelligent and inspiring women, all sharing their dreams and ideas.”

SUIT UP AND SHOW UP

Life is full of lessons. One I learned in my early twenties, while working as a volunteer missionary in Uruguay, proved immensely valuable to my Dare to Dream pursuits. It’s common practice among missionaries to pray that we’ll find people who are interested in our message. Being thousands of miles from home, as my peers and I were in Uruguay, those prayers became pretty fervent because people often ignored us, or worse, slammed doors in our faces. That’s why I found the words of one of our leaders, a Dutchman by the name of Jacob de Jager, both surprising and compelling. “Instead of praying that you’ll find people, pray that they’ll find you,” he said. In other words, if we make grand plans, and get on with executing them, our dreams will find us. Suit up and show up. We might not learn to dream until we’re grown—but if we show up, our dreams will too.

I dream best when I start simply. I encourage you to take a similar approach: begin reading this book, even a page or two at a time, scribble notes in the margins, mull over the ideas as you move through your day, notice the ideas that gently alight in your mind, act on one or two of them. Then repeat.

Regardless of the dream, we all start in the same place, a place of possibility, of seeing something that looks and feels so much bigger than we are or maybe believe we could ever be. That’s why a dream is a dare. But we do it anyway, because dreaming matters—to our families, our communities, the world, and especially to ourselves. When we dream, remarkable things can happen.

Do you dare?