Dreams of Success

With the Olympics in full swing, today I figured we'd talk about dreams.  Dedicating a persons life to their dreams can place a person in an interesting situation, sometime success, sometimes failure.

I was going to be a video game animator, I dedicated four years of my college life to it, and went in obscene student debt, literally they wanted a house payment a month to repay.  The problem was that about two years into it I discovered the details about my dream career and decided that I would be sacrificing too much, 60-80 hours a week would murder my family life.  The decision to stay in school became more a default, no longer a dream.

Look at Wu Minxia, a young Chinese diver who was taken from her family and trained day in and day out to dive.  Sure she got the gold for the third time, but at what cost?  Not knowing her family, not knowing her mother was battling cancer or that her grandparents had died!  We'll never know if it was her dream originally or if it was the dream of her family and government, but she was dedicated and she did work hard.

Dreams are a driving factor for all of us, whether its a dream of owning a home, being an olympic athlete, becoming a doctor, having children, and all dreams come with a fight if they are to come true and be a success. 

For those of us that write there is almost always a dream of being discovered and hitting it big.  But in most cases, it takes dedication and time.  

Putting dreams into our characters makes them more real, offers them a driving force, and shows the reason why they are who they are.