Be Unrealistic

Be Unrealistic

Someone recently said something to me that I haven't been able to shake.

Lisa Nichols, during one of the Mindvalley programs I've been going through, said this: "Realistic is someone else's reality of me."

Read that again.

All those times someone told you to be realistic, they weren't describing you. They were describing the ceiling they believed existed for you. And somewhere along the way, most of us accepted it.

I did.

I'm 43 years old, a father of three, and I am just now unlearning years of other people's definitions of what's possible for me. Teachers, parents, bullies, coaches, even well-meaning friends, they all had a version of reality for me. And I took it in and made it my own. I tucked my imagination away like it was something to be embarrassed about.

The worst part? You don't even realize it's happening.

You just start believing that the big ideas are silly. That certain dreams belong to other people. That wanting more, or different, or bigger, is naive. And life starts to feel like you're going through the motions of someone else's script.

That's where I was.

And here's what hit me hardest when I started doing this work on myself: I started saying the same things to my kids. Not to hurt them. Not on purpose. But because we teach what we know, even when what we know isn't serving us.

"Be realistic."

"That's not going to happen."

"You have to be practical."

We say these things thinking we're protecting them. Preparing them. But what we're actually doing is handing them the same cage we grew up in, just with better wrapping paper.

Your kid wants to be a professional athlete. A best-selling author. An astronaut. An artist. Whatever it is, the dream is big and bright and full of belief. And the instinct, especially as a parent who has been burned by disappointment, is to soften it. To cushion the fall before it happens.

But what if there is no fall? What if we're the ones creating the fall by convincing them it's coming?

Dream big doesn't mean ignore reality. It means refuse to let someone else's imagination become the limit of yours. Your kid can want to be a world champion and also learn the discipline, the work ethic, the resilience it takes to chase something that hard. Those two things go together. The dream is the fuel. Taking it away doesn't protect them from failure. It just takes away the engine.

What I'm learning now, at 43, is that the personal development industry is basically a massive recovery program for people whose imaginations got crushed somewhere between childhood and adulthood. Every book, every course, every speaker is saying the same thing: dream big, believe in yourself, nothing is impossible if you're willing to work toward it in stages.

We're all relearning at 30, 40, 50 what we already knew at 7.

What if our kids never had to unlearn it?

That's the question I keep coming back to. Because it's not too late for us, either. I want to be clear about that. I'm going after things right now that people in my life would probably call unrealistic. A published author. A better father. A man who broke cycles instead of passing them on. None of that felt realistic a few years ago. But it's happening, in stages, with action, with belief.

You can do the same thing. And more importantly, you can raise kids who never stopped believing it was possible in the first place.

Let them dream big. Dream with them, even.

And if you're not sure where to start, try this. Ask yourself first: if you could be a little unrealistic, what would you go after? What would you do if no one was allowed to tell you it wasn't possible?

Then ask your kids the same thing. You might be surprised. Or you might realize they've been around us long enough that they already hesitate. That they already edit themselves before the answer even comes out. That's okay. That's where the work starts, for both of you.

You don't need a roadmap for the next 40 years. Just talk to them like you're all in the same story together, on the same journey, figuring it out as you go. Because you are.

Be unrealistic. It's not too late for either of you.