Everyone has a dream. Martin Luther King’s was a Mother of a dream. Yours may appear petty in comparison…to everyone but you. It is yours and it is magnificent and sweeping and grand: The best that can be. But the question is, will it ever make the cosmic transition from dream to reality?

The truth is, life races by and the dreams wave back. And you keep promising that you will turn the dream into reality, but you don’t. You blame it on the gods and circumstances and religion and tradition and other people, but it’s you that builds the wall you refuse to pass through. Just you.

Life is a precious gift. To refuse to live it to its utmost, to the extreme -in effect, to seize the dream- is a form of “sin.” Not the kind you go to hell for but a more insidious kind that deprives you of what can and should be the most important thing in your life. When King Edward VII of England fell passionately in love with Wallis Simpson, the only way he could fulfill his dream and marry her, was to do the undoable: abdicate from the throne. Which he did in a heartbeat. In doing so, in breaking the rules others had set for him, he reversed the general and passive order of things: his dreams took flight and life threw a kiss for his courage and his passion.

I walk into countless meetings and hear of dreams. I fly in planes and hear of dreams. I attend conferences and hear of dreams. And I love dreamers because they have the electricity of life. But so often it remains static electricity. “My career would be what I really want it to be, but…”, “My company would break new ground in our industry and achieve truly dramatic breakthroughs, however…”

Dreams are like snowflakes. They dance from the sky and powder the world with possibilities and in most every case, melt and disappear, leaving nothing but what might have been in their place.

Those who took the snowflake in mid flight and refused to let it melt dominate the history of the world. Abraham Lincoln would not let the dream of a great and enduring republic vanish. That fact that there were armies of men slaughtering each other did not stop him. Franklin Roosevelt had a dream of a near broken America rising up from its despair to its finest potential. That he could not stand without braces did not stop him from carrying the whole damn world on his back. Edwin Land’s daughter asked him why it took so long to produce a photograph and he dreamed and created instant photography. Rosa Parks dreamed of sitting in the front of a bus. And with the threat of death all around her, that is precisely what she did.

At this moment, in companies and firms and homes around the world, millions of dreams are out there, in holding patterns, waiting to take flight. Will yours? Life WILL fly by.

The question is, will your dreams wave back? Snowflakes of the mind?

Mark Stevens
CEO

Tell Me About Your Dreams…

Everything in life is doomed at the start. There is no question that it will have a trajectory, the only mystery is how long and far the flight will last. A heat-seeking missile embedded within whatever you have built, simply waits for the right time to fire and bring it to the ground. Why? We haven’t a clue. But in our moments of champagne euphoria, it is good to be armed with the knowledge of the truth. With the knowledge that this too will pass. With the knowledge that behind it, another rocket is ready to launch. Another journey ready to be taken. Renewal is one of the true majesties of life. Interesting, we think the end, of a business, a job, a passion, a relationship, tells us something about the beginning. But the polar opposite is true. The beginning and the end are born at precisely the same time. But in the giddiness of the new we refuse to see that it is an imposter for the end. All of the fault lines and limitations and physics and DNA that will destroy it, are there in full view when the opening toasts are made.

Imagine if we looked for them. If we engaged in due diligence at the start. Hunted down the enemies of the good and the beautiful and the successful-the enemies of longevity-and destroyed them before they ruined what we have built. What we adored. What we looked at with amazing pride. What we had every right to be proud of because we vested it with care and intellect and creativity and drive and faith. Blind faith. Reckless faith. Joyous faith.

It would change nothing. You have to throw yourself at the things you create in life with wonderful abandon and let them fly for as long as the gods allow. Probably the truest axiom is that the secret to life is enjoying the passage of time. That’s all you need to do… and it is endlessly wonderful. Because when the business dies, you can form another. When the job turns into a drudge, you can walk across the street. When the strategy or the campaign fails-and ultimately it will-you can rethink it and raise the curtain on ACT II.

It is just important to know at the start-not to dwell on it but to know-that there will inevitably be an ACT II. And you are alive. And you can seize it. We all have to live knowing that there is so much we do not and cannot understand. The trick is never to let that mystery hold us hostage. Or stop us from taking risk.

Until we know why the sun never shines at night and the moon never cries in the morning, we are on our own. Free to build and create and manage and love, knowing the uncertainty just makes it more enthralling.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Tell me what in your life, your work, have you forgotten has a trajectory?

All great people look the impossible in the eye and make it possible. Why? Because they know there is no such thing as impossible. It is a myth created by the observers of life who are threatened or frightened by the possible. And thus unwilling to scale the barriers they erect to achieve the magnificence of something all the Naysayers insist can’t be achieved.

The fact is, everything is possible. Think of the things that were impossible a century ago, absolutely impossible if you asked the life observers.

The barrier builders:

• Television
• Jet Planes
• Computers
• The Internet
• Antibiotics
• Genetic Engineering
• Cell Phones

If the observers of life ruled, none of these products, none of the companies that make them, would exist today. Nor would the impossibilities that will replace them every single year from now to eternity. The courageous will find a way to turn the impossible into the actual. Into the living, breathing things no one ever expected to see because, well, it was impossible.

In his fine album Back To Bedlam, James Blunt sings a haunting song about the death of bravery in the world. The sad thing is that it’s true. The good thing is that if you are brave, you can do it all. Replace the Internet. Out google Google. Find sweetness and joy and love and success where others see only the impossible. This is where opportunity lies: at the nexus of the Naysayers and the possible. This is where you can build a grand life. This is where you can develop an extraordinary career. This is where you can form a world-beater of a company. This is where you can be true to yourself as opposed to the observers of life. The worshippers of the impossible. They will always tell you that something is in the way of the voyage. To them, the possible is always 50 miles away and that last 50 miles is beyond reach.

What they really mean is that it is 50 miles to the impossible.

Don’t listen. Put in your earplugs and keep moving. You will cross the line from observer to a life truly lived. You will be brave. And you will inherit the earth.

Mark Stevens
CEO

What Barriers Have You Faced & How Did You Overcome Them?

You can’t see it coming. There is no omen. No drum roll. No sense of impending romance or intrigue.

And then suddenly, everything changes. It comes out of the night like Haley’s comet, electric tail illuminating the sky, and you know you have seen something, experienced something so powerful, that you will never be the same.

You stand there, motionless, watching a fire on a lake.

It is a life changer. Spiritual and emotional, it radiates through your heart and your brain and prompts you to reconsider “what is” and to imagine, in spite of the obstacles and the challenges, “what could be.”

Only people can do this to and for you. Only you can do it to others. One of the sublime things about life, about business, is that you can experience this working side by side with others who open your eyes to new dimensions. I am often asked what makes great managers. Is it an MBA from Harvard? Ten years of cross-functional experience at GE? Absolutely not. It is being alone in a studio watching Picasso turn blank canvases into cubes of radiance. It is observing Martha Stewart as she turned the art of entertaining into an empire. It is the person in the office next door who shows you how to identify atomic particles, twist them into novel configurations and shape them into living, breathing figments of your imagination.

Working hard is not even close to enough. You need to experience the comets. To learn from them. To let yourself be captured, to absorb, to dream, to love, to experiment, to dare. This is what makes great leaders great.

They see the fire on the lake and they change.

Mark Stevens
CEO

What Are You Waiting For To Change?

• They never listen to petty chatter
• They have no time for losers
• They never play by the rules…they write them
• They dream and innovate. Dream and innovate!
• They are self-made kings and queens

And what do they get for all of this drive and guts and determination and originality? Just all the fun, all the money, and all the power in the world.

And the knowledge that they make a difference.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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