What's Your Dream?

Free Yourself

When I met Caitlin, there was no question that she had a dream. She was young, ambitious and knew exactly what she wanted to do with her life. She already had the name for her photography business: Chromatics by Caitlin.

As she told me when I asked about her dream, ‘I’d probably just travel and take pictures all the time. I’d just like to go everywhere and do photography for a living.’

Why, I immediately asked, was she not doing this already?

‘Because it’s too hard to get to a place where you have enough money to just be able to go and do that. I’d have to get a job with a good salary and then I’d have to save . . .’

Caitlin’s response was revealing. It was a version of what so many people say when I ask why they are not pursuing their dream right now. In fact, it’s probably the single biggest barrier that stands between us and the thing we most want in life. We tell ourselves that we can’t have it. That we’ll have to build up to it and do it later (maybe). That the dream must wait until some magical ‘right time’ in the future.

Put another way, Caitlin was trapped – trapped by all the myths we talked about earlier, by the idea that you need a job to succeed in life, and by her belief that her passion was a hobby and not a potentially profitable business. Instead of thinking about how she could achieve her dream and make it pay for itself, she was worrying about how she could afford it. She believed photography was something that would cost her money rather than seeing that it could actually make money.

It wasn’t Caitlin’s fault that she thought like this. No one had ever taught her about business. Like everyone else, she had picked up the same old mantras about a steady job and hard work from school. It meant that she was disregarding some obvious ways to fund her dream and get started straight away.

The most relevant to her was sponsorship. This is a critical source of funding for many young people who want to build modern digital businesses. You might be selling photographs online, promoting a podcast or seeking to become an influencer. What links them all is that you are creating something potentially valuable: an audience and a community that engages with you. If you do this well, brands will pay to associate themselves with you and tap into that audience. This is one of the most straightforward ways of doing what you love and getting paid to do it. Even if you don’t have a following, you can do this through purpose. Find a brand that shares your purpose and ask them to support and back you now, before you are big. You will be surprised how many companies are prepared to back someone early if they can see the promise.