Are you a dreamer?

This is long so feel free to skip it.

Caspar David Friedrich – The dreamer

Today, let me tell you two quick stories:

Story #1: The man who walked through life backwards.

Yann Martel is a prominent Canadian writer. Yesterday, Sep 22, 2013, I was in attendance of the Word on the Street festival in Saskatoon (Word on the Street is a magazine and book fair stretching all across Canada) to listen to Yann as he read from his upcoming novel. In short, Yann told us the big why behind his new novel. He said that in life, we are often ‘imprisoned’ by our insitence on rationality as the main vehicle for navigating through and understanding life.

To illustrate his point, he read an interesting passage about the characters in said novel. This person almost exclusively walked backwards through life. On one hand, many of his contemporaries felt that his behaviour was not rational. One the other hand, said character (his name was Tomas) was ahead of them, as he was able to gain a unique perspective on all sorts of things in life.

Story #2: A tale of two sisters.

Looneyspoons – Janet and Greta Podleski were also in attendance of the Word on the Street festival to share their unbelievable story from rags to riches. In short, they went from the basement of their tiny Ottawa bungalow (filled with unopened Visa, MasterCard, and utility bills piling up, alongside a stack of rejection letters from publishers), to spending 85 consecutive weeks on the national bestseller list and selling 850,000 copies of their original cookbook titled Looneyspoons. If you have a minute, you can read the whole story here. You’ll likely enjoy it.

The connecting tread between the above two stories? People such as Yan Martel and Janet and Greta Podleski remind us that it is only by dreaming first that we get to new realities. All those who eventually become successful first do a fair bit of dreaming. It’s easy to forget that.

Sep 23, ’13