“Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinion drowned your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”–Steve Jobs
The other night I had the best dream ever. I had taken a job as a call center supervisor, a job I have done in the past but have found to be unrewarding and downright soul crushing. I did it for the money, because in the dream I had caved to the difficulties and lack of stable income that comes with a creative lifestyle. I was getting settled into my cubicle when Tracy Morgan walked in, as his 30 Rock character Tracy Jordan. In a stilted voice, as if he were reading from a queue card, he said “Hello, my name is TV’s Tracy Jordan. You don’t have to do this. This is just a bad dream. To prove it, I will now go steal a penguin and then take everyone here to lunch at Chili’s“. Everyone in the call center cheered and began to run out of the building.
Stealing a penguin doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. If you watch 30 Rock, you know that Tracy does a lot of things that don’t make sense to anyone other than Tracy. Yet he’s generally a good person with a good heart, and he somehow manages to be highly successful in life in spite of the fact that he does things that are counter-intuitive or plain crazy in the eyes of most people. The symbolism of his appearance in this dream seems pretty clear.
Cut to Tracy, a penguin, and I sitting in Chili’s looking at menus, the restaurant filled with other call center workers. Now, a quick sidebar, Chili’s was my ex-wife’s favorite restaurant. She was not what you’d call culinarily adventurous. I would say that about 90% of the time, when we went out to eat, we went to Chili’s. It was safe and predictable. The symbolism here is, again, obvious. Tracy, the penguin, and I were even sitting in a booth in the bar, which is where my ex and I usually sat.
At this point Henry Rollins walks up to the booth and starts yelling at me. “Chili’s? Seriously? Seriously, dude?” There was a little more profanity than that, and if you’ve ever heard Henry rant you get the point. This was a guy who had a safe job managing an ice cream parlor, and left it to make a huge leap of faith and pursue a career as a punk musician. He’s made a lot of leaps of faith in his career, and he’s been successful because he’s an iconoclast and isn’t afraid to follow his dreams. The symbolism here is unmistakable.
I woke up and immediately had to write this all down, because I tend to forget my dream pretty quickly. While I was up, I checked sales figures for Asparagus Jumpsuit. I learned that we’d had our best sales week ever. It all seemed to validate that eschewing “traditional wisdom” and the easy path was the right thing for me to do.
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