The straitjacket of complacency

Back in the eighties, I heard a Danish radio host say the following words: "Only rarely things go according to our dreams - and if they do, our dreams have been too small."
There quite a lot of truth in ths. We do wisely when we set goals for ourselves. Of course these goals shall not be unobtainable. But if they are too small and too easy to accomplish, and if we do not set gradually bigger goals, already while we are in the process of meeting the current goals, we are at risk becoming satisfied with too little, and then we end up catching ourselves in the straitjacket of complacency.
And that is no nice place to end up in.
(Translated from Selvtilfredshedens spændetrøje)

On the topic of dreaming

This was not originally thought to be a post about quotes and their origin, but it ended up beginning like that anyway - as I dived into the quote:

If you can dream it, you can do it.

I found that it did not originate from Walt Disney personally, eventhough it is attributed to him by many people. It seems to be a quote by Tom Fitzgerald, who put the words together while working as  "imagineer" - a job I would love to have, dragged together from "imagination" and "engineering". It covers a position in design and development within Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development, Inc. - but now I think I have started digressing...
The original point was that I do not necessarily believe in a one-to-one-relationship between what can be imagined and what can be done. On the other hand, I am pretty certain that another relationship exists - a relationship which can be described by

If you can't even dream it, how could you dream of doing it?

All that's left to say is: make sure to keep your dreams and your powers of imagination alive and well. Who knows? Something worth turning into reality, might come out of it.
(Translated from Noget om at drømme, originally published February 4, 2014)

On the topic of big dreams

In relation to the death of Muhammad Ali a couple of weeks ago, I ran into a quote which might (or might not) be a Muhammad Ali-quote. I have seen it attributed to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia, as well; she said it in a speech to the graduating class from Harvard in 2011. Deep down, however, it is of less importance who originally said that:

If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough.

- I am certain that it is true. Because if our dreams become so small and unambitious that they are mostly there for cosiness, then we have dragged them so far into the comfort zone that we should have been living them long ago, while starting to dream more ambitiously. Otherwise we have just arrived in a situation, where we do not dream. We have simply fallen asleep. (Translated from Noget om store drømme)