7
When Short-Term Needs Clash with Long-Term Goals

It’s a common dilemma. We have an exciting long-term goal, but there are pressing short-term needs that cannot be ignored. The two seem in conflict; meeting our short-term obligations and responsibilities is a full-time job that keeps the long-term dream forever “on hold.”

The way out of this dilemma begins with the realization that life is not only like a box of chocolates (in the Forrest-Gumpian sense of “never knowing what you’re going to get”). In many ways life is also like a glass of lemonade—sweetness is involved, and sourness is involved, and unless the two are in balance the whole thing’s going to leave a bad taste in your mouth.

In the absence of an aspirational field, life slips out of alignment—but also out of balance. These two terms are often used interchangeably (as when the wheels on one’s car are “out of alignment” and thus need to be “rebalanced”) but strictly speaking refer to separate issues. The magnet brings randomly scattered iron filings into visible alignment; but if dense clumps of neatly aligned filings remain at one end of the field, with only sparse scatterings at the other, this field—while aligned—is not evenly balanced.

We described the unaligned life in the previous chapter: waking hours divided between work that delivers little or no satisfaction, and leisure time largely spent consuming the output of other people’s dreams. What does the unbalanced life look like?

When most people refer to a need for greater balance in their lives, they are typically bemoaning the fact that the dividing line between work and leisure does not fall in the figurative “middle”—that is, too much of their time is devoted to work-related matters, too little to everything else. But in the context of dreamcrafting, we can define this same imbalance in a different and more precise way: in the absence of any compelling long-term objective (Big Dream) to command their time and attention, most people invest almost all of their energies in pursuit of short-term objectives (paying the bills, keeping up with the Joneses). It is the dividing line between long-term focus and short-term focus that does not fall in the “middle.” It is this obsessive emphasis on forever-urgent short-term needs, to the exclusion of any inspiring long-term vision, that creates a suffocating sense of imbalance in so many lives. As the Bible reminds us at Proverbs 29:18, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

The unbalanced life focuses on short-term needs
to the exclusion of any long-term goal.

For the dreamcrafter armed with a vision of success, the challenge becomes one of moving the line closer to the middle—that is, of achieving balance by redirecting some of the short-term focus toward the long-term goal.

Grabbers and Anticipators

I intend to live forever,” goes the old joke. “So far so good.” The body requires oxygen to live; even a brief deprivation can be lethal. The body requires health to live long. Oxygen allows short-term survival, but on its own it does not confer long-term health. Anyone hoping to live long must meet immediate oxygen needs and long-term health needs as well. A balance must be struck.

This ability to balance immediate needs or desires against longer-term benefits may be one of the key hallmarks of people of achievement. In a study originally published in the journal Developmental Psychology in 1990 and summarized in Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence, groups of four-year-olds were seated before a bowl of marshmallows and told that if they waited until the adult experimenter returned from a twenty minute errand, they could enjoy two marshmallows as a treat. Or, if they found it impossible to wait that long, they could enjoy a marshmallow immediately—but only one. About one-third of the children grabbed their single marshmallow almost the instant the experimenter left the room; the others forced themselves to wait, covering their eyes to avoid seeing the temptation before them, or singing songs to themselves, or inventing games to play to fill the time.

When these same children were tracked down as adolescents fourteen or so years later, there were dramatic differences between those who were able to delay their gratification and those who were not. The “grabbers” tended to be seen as reluctant to make social connections, to be easily frustrated, to become virtually paralyzed by stress, to feel resentful that they were never “getting enough,” and remained unable to control their need for immediate gratification. The “anticipators” who had waited for their two marshmallows were more sociable, able to cope more effectively with frustration and disappointment, less prone to buckle under stress, and more likely to take initiatives and welcome challenges. And they continued to be able to delay their gratification as part of achieving their goals.

Does this give the lie to a bird in the hand being worth two in the bush? Not at all—the saying compares a certainty with a greater but completely uncertain alternative. There was no uncertainty about the two-marshmallow treat for the anticipators; the issue here is whether one bird in the hand now is worth two birds in the hand later.

We can see an adult version of the marshmallow test in the way some people manage their personal finances. The grabbers focus on cash—get as much cash as possible flowing immediately, and put that cash to work immediately on an extravagant home and fancy cars and all the imagined trappings of “the good life,” all the sooner the better. The anticipators focus on wealth. They know cash flow (like oxygen) is essential for financial survival, but choose to spend less now, so that more of their money and energy can be put to work generating wealth (financial health) later. Grabbers spend, to consume; this depletes resources. Anticipators invest, to create; this replenishes resources.

Let’s say a grabber and an anticipator are both exotic-car buffs. The grabber is of course first to park two expensive sports cars in the family garage; but simply paying for and maintaining these two expensive items creates a major drain on his or her cash flow, and thus a great proportion of his or her time and attention must be focused on generating more cash, rather than wealth.

The anticipator “makes do” with one fancy car for now; the time and energy saved by not having to pursue cash flow with such obsessive intensity is invested in wealth-generating activities that could eventually lead to owning nine expensive cars. (If ownership of expensive cars remains important to this individual at all, that is; some anticipators become so adept at resisting the “urge to splurge” that by the time they can afford the things they thought they wanted, they discover these things no longer seem as important or meaningful to them.)

It’s easy to find ourselves trapped within a lifestyle we created because we wanted it all right away, a lifestyle that is now virtually sucking the lifeblood out of us. In the corporate setting one finds “successful” senior executives who are among the unhappiest people around. They are locked into an existence that essentially requires them to repeat the same success over and over again, with diminishing returns in terms of personal satisfaction. Climbing the same mountain every year, year in and year out, is no longer a dream—it’s become little more than an exhausting nightmare. In Greek mythology Sisyphus attempted to cheat the gods and avoid death; his eternal punishment was to push up the side of a mountain a huge stone that rolled down every time he neared the summit. “Hell goes round and round,” wrote Irish novelist Flann O’Brien in The Third Policeman. “In shape it is circular and by nature it is interminable, repetitive and very nearly unbearable.” Hamsters may be perfectly content to spend the bulk of their waking lives running hellbent-for-leather inside a wheel that goes nowhere; most people are not. And yet there are many, as authors John De Graaf, David Wann, and Thomas H. Naylor point out in their book Affluenza, who find themselves paying hundreds of dollars per month for a car that serves primarily to get them back and forth to a job that earns them enough cash to be able to pay for the car.

We start to grow by letting go. If a surplus of short-term demands leaves little or no room for a long-term mission, then to achieve a better balance means some of the short-term stuff has got to go. In the previous chapter we referred to values as “suitcase words”; the entrapped would-be dreamcrafter is carrying suitcases that are so overstuffed, there is no room for new knowledge or experience to be added, and thus no opportunity for growth or advancement. Life has become little more than an ongoing struggle just to keep things as they are, to maintain the status quo, to protect the fortress. This is a fortress that does more than lock the world out—it also locks its inhabitants in.

The Big Dream must have the motivational might of the Saturn 5 rocket behind it to break free of the powerful gravitational pull of the status quo; once it has done so, some of the stages can be safely jettisoned. The dreamcrafter’s values remain perfectly intact, but some of the “baggage” in those suitcases—behaviors and obligations that sprang from the original hunger to “have it all right away”—are no longer relevant as the focus shifts toward a vision of future success. These are the kinds of items that can be discarded or sold off or donated to charity or discontinued.

Those who tout the near-miraculous sense of freedom that comes from “simplifying” their lives are describing what it feels like to get rid of this cumbersome baggage, to climb out from under the cumulative weight of duties and obligations and endless possessions that are no longer in alignment with who they are or what they want out of life. They are setting foot outside the fortress for the first time in a long while, and discovering they’d forgotten how sweet the fresh air smells outdoors.

But of course in any discussion about “now” versus “later,” we must acknowledge that for some people, the very act of simplifying their lives— of freeing themselves of some of their burdensome short-term obligations in order to make it possible to pursue a longer-term objective—is not something they can easily do right now. It would be irresponsible for a would-be dreamcrafter to impulsively walk away from a lucrative but demanding job, for example, without considering how this might be in violation of core values that relate to the welfare of his or her children or other dependents.

As with so much of the dreamcrafting process, the quickest way to make the transition to a more balanced life with a minimum of anxiety and disruption is to do so slowly, steadily, methodically.

Equilibrium by Evolution, Not Revolution

As mentioned in the introduction, the authors of this book—one a former security guard, the other a former telephone installer— both found ways to transform their jobs into training grounds for their respective Big Dreams. In effect, they corrected the imbalance in their lives by incorporating elements of their long-term vision into their immediate short-term job responsibilities. It’s a theme explored at length in the book Whistle While You Work by Richard J. Leider and David A. Shapiro: if you cannot “change jobs,” look for ways to “change your job.”

Think about that exhausting job that leaves you so little opportunity to pursue your own dream, and ask yourself, how could your job be changed to provide opportunities to cultivate some skill, knowledge, contacts, etc., that would be useful in the pursuit of your mission? Or, what other role or assignment within your workplace could you apply for that might provide such opportunities? With a little ingenuity, virtually anyone can find some way to incorporate elements of their dream into the most seemingly unrelated sorts of jobs—the accountant who dreams of building a sailboat asks to be assigned to clients with nautical connections or interests; the plumber who yearns to become an actor offers special discounts on plumbing services for theatrical establishments.

Creating this kind of connection between short-term needs and a long-term goal keeps the motivational fires burning during a period that dreamcrafters might otherwise find frustratingly unproductive. But it does more than this. It opens doors of opportunity in unexpected ways. It provides avenues of escape from the fortress that no one could have anticipated, shortcuts to the Big Dream that otherwise would never have come to light. Chance encounters with others of like mind lead to exchanges of information about useful contacts, relevant events, helpful techniques—any number of elements that may bring the dream closer to reality. It is just one more way that a strong aspirational field—that is, a powerful sense of mission—brings life into alignment as if by magic.

A demanding and unfulfilling day job is not the only kind of short-term obligation that can draw time and energy away from a long-term mission. Once again, if it is not possible to jettison one or more of these obligations (at least for now), the question becomes, how could these be modified to support the mission? A fitness buff who wishes he or she could spend time at the gym on a treadmill must instead attend the children’s soccer game; perhaps, instead of watching the game from the bleachers, he or she could briskly pace back and forth along the length of the field throughout the game. An individual who dreams of improving his or her vocabulary must devote hours to mowing the lawn and general yard maintenance every weekend; perhaps if he or she were to record words with their definitions into a cassette recorder, these tapes could be played and replayed on headphones while work was being done in the yard. Through creative bundling and multitasking of this kind, virtually any seemingly unrelated activity can be linked to the mission. Once again, all it requires is a little ingenuity.

None of these approaches produce a radical, revolutionary realignment that instantly brings short-term obligations and long-term aspirations into perfect balance; rather, they shift the balance gradually, in small evolutionary increments. But as is so often the case in dreamcrafting, it all adds up. Instead of spending all their time and energy to support their consumption-based lifestyle, entrapped dreamcrafters begin investing more and more of it toward the creation of a new way of living, represented by their dream. Each investment of this sort becomes another grain of sand tipping the scale a little closer to equilibrium. As the aspirational field grows stronger, so too does the determination to succeed. The power of “will” intensifies and begins to challenge the perception of “can’t.” And where there’s a will, of course, there’s a way. The greater the will, the easier it invariably becomes to find the way.

Dreamcrafting involves defining the dream with precision, and cultivating high levels of optimism and enthusiasm, and using measurement and celebration as time-release motivators, and uncovering ways to free up time and energy to devote to the dream.

As we’re about to see, the entire process becomes much easier with the support and participation of others.