Dreaming...

One unfinished talk I had the other day with some people was about dreaming. They were just preparing a seminar to estimulate young people to be entrepreneur, a priority in a country with more than 10% unemployment.

However, I had some experience with that. In fact, I've worked with one of the first universities to create a proper entrepreneurship program in an arrangement with the Instituto Técnico de Monterrey. And my experience stated that people don't dream much nowadays.

The theory I heard is that old people do not dream, but young people, YES, they are full of enthusiasm! That was not what I saw.

One of these lectures given in that university was during the day and I saw an elder person there. She was not sitting where professors were supposed to sit, so I asked someone if she was a new member of staff. They told me she was in fact a student. After two or three people whose dreams were to finish that course, I called her in front. She told us how she used to work in a small hotel in a small town, whilst bringing up her children. At some point, she bought the hotel and then she decided she needed to study to perform better, and there she was. Her dream was to have a top hotel for the region, something I am sure she has reached.

Another theory - and my friends told me that - was that rich young people don't dream, people need to lack something in their lives for dreaming. However, I had two different experiences which told me the opposite.

The first one was in Chile. I lived in Santiago for two years, and I had the chance to meet many young people as I was myself much younger than today (yes, I am still young!). What I noticed there was the abundance of dreams. Most of these boys and girls had parents who trained them to work early, in fact one of them, Eduardo Soler, good friend and president of a company in Chile now, told me as his parents cut his allowance and he was obliged to work, even though he had his university fees, transportation, food and etc. all covered.

The second experience was to give a lecture for a group of 13-year old students in Medellin. It was a mixture of people with few finantial resources and people who used to have a good finantial situation. Again, I was facing a group of young and very skilled people, with lots of potential but no real dream there, except getting married...

Dream, as the hability of imagining a new situation, is probably a human feature. Dream is the thing that made many of our heroes to challenge their own status quo and brave themselves into new worlds. Columbus, the MayFlower and Marco Polo are a few of many people or group of people who dreamed with a new order.

But, look, they didn't only imagine a new order, they went to look for it, they built it and they changed the world as it was at that time. If we stop dreamming, we are cutting that same possibility of a new world which perhaps is at our arm reach.

In fact, theories apart, I think the main reason people are stopping to dream is the fact they have been unable to put that wonderful imagination of theirs into practise, but that is for another post.