Is "Chasing Your Dreams" Worth It?
Honestly...
I wish this wasn’t a question I worried about.
Lately, I wish a lot of things were different.
Right now, for instance, I’m sitting at a Starbucks in Toledo, Ohio. It’s 8 in the morning, and I’ve been sitting here writing for nearly 2 hours. I barely slept last night. It was my first night in a new room and I couldn’t get my mind off my to-do list — a list that gets longer by the hour.
After I finish this draft, I’ll head to the gym, where I’ll do my first training session of the day. Then, I’ll lift, edit this piece and the other piece I did this morning, and head back to the gym tonight for more training.
I’m exhausted. My body aches from training. My wrists burn from typing. My mind runs like a broken keyboard.
It’s moments like these, where I’m exhausted and overworked, that my defenses drop, and I ask myself that uneasy and uncomfortable question:
Is any of this really f*cking worth it?
Back when I was a boy…
One of the only things in life I ever wanted to be was a professional competitive athlete.
I tried soccer, football, baseball, and even basketball, but every attempt to get good at a sport didn’t work out. I’d get cut from the team, ride the bench, strike out looking, or, in the case of basketball, get laughed out of the gym.
At 12, I found wrestling, and through wrestling, I found Jiu-Jitsu, which has given me the opportunity to live out this professional competitive athlete dream that I’ve always had — at least, in some ways. Jiu-Jitsu has, and continues to be one of the coolest rides I’ve ever gotten to go on.
It wasn’t some great tragedy or triumph and it never has been — even if I like to romanticize it sometimes — but this has been my experience. My athletic career has mostly been built on a decade (and then some) of hard work, discipline, and luck.
I do something deeply fulfilling, incredibly fun, and despite everything, I am incredibly happy with what I do.
But that isn’t why any of this matters. That alone isn’t enough to make it with it.
On the surface, nothing matters that much.
In Jiu-Jitsu, people get jaded very easily.
They have a bad falling out with an instructor, a string of bad matches, some injuries, or some other bad experience, and in time, they start to forget what makes Jiu-Jitsu valuable. They start to see the Jiu-Jitsu as a means to an end.
They see their dream job as more of a job than a dream. They see Jiu-Jitsu as nothing but the sport of submission wrestling.
I know this because I did this.
This was why I quit doing the gi (it’s hard to make money competing in the gi). This is why I’m going to be moving soon to elevate my training. This is why I study the sport obsessively, looking to always be learning the most cutting-edge techniques that I can.
After a while, you get burned out. You forget why you dedicated all that time to it in the first place.
Until “something” brings you back.
For me, that thing has always been writing.
I have a bit of an anxious mind, and writing helps me orient myself in the world.
It creates a structure that my brain can understand so that I don’t feel the heavy chaos of the world. It makes my tiny existence feel significant. It makes me feel like I make a difference, even when it’s just me selfishly putting words onto a page.
Even when I’m writing content and not art, writing helps me feel normal.
I started writing in a journal around the same time I started doing Jiu-Jitsu, although my parents will tell you that as a child, I always had a notebook with me.
It’s true.
When I was a kid, all I wanted was to play sports and write about them all day.
Today, that is basically what I do for a living.
My dream job is my job because I created it, even if there was and is no blueprint.
The hardest part of a dream job is keeping the dream alive.
These last few months have been especially testing.
I’ve been traveling constantly, working like a maniac, testing myself in ways I’ve only dreamed about, and spending a lot of money. It’s been a challenging few months, to say the least.
I miss having a bed and a routine and seeing my friends every day. I miss eating the same foods every day and sleeping 8 hours a night like clockwork. I miss little things that make life feel routine.
They say that in moments like the ones I’ve been having, where you want to give up, you need to ask yourself why you started.
“So,” I asked myself the other day, “why the f*ck did you start doing any of this, anyway?”
That’s actually not a great question.
The truth is that most people don’t usually start things for some fancy philosophical reason.
I started Jiu-Jitsu because I was a 17-year-old who wanted to get in a cage and knock someone unconscious. Someone recently told me they started Jiu-Jitsu because they thought it was karate — like Cobra Kai. I started writing because I was bored in my dorm room and didn’t want to go to a football game on one random Saturday in October of 2015.
Why you start doesn’t matter. What matters are the reasons you create to keep going.
These reasons should be bigger than yourself.
I keep competing for selfish reasons, which is why I know I won't do it forever.
However, the other pursuits in my life, like writing, running a passion-based business, and teaching Jiu-Jitsu are all things that I keep doing because the “why” is deeper than myself. They directly involve others.
My writing helps people — I’ve been told that enough times that by now I have to accept it. At the very least, a few people seem to like it.
My writing/Jiu-Jitsu “career” is important because there is no blueprint for doing this. If I don’t figure it out, who will? If I do figure it out, I can leave a blueprint to help other people live more happy and fulfilled lives.
I won’t use this article to write about all the positive benefits of teaching Jiu-Jitsu (without being a cash-grabbing, cult-running egomaniac), but I promise you, they’re there. I believe that teaching Jiu-Jitsu is a decent way to make a living.
If you’ve read this far, you probably want to believe that too.
Closing Thoughts
So, is chasing your dreams really worth it?
I believe that people have an existential responsibility to develop interests, pursue those interests, and chase the things that they want.
If the goal of life was merely to wake up, go to work, and then eventually die, what would besides sets of antennae would differentiate us from a colony of ants? The grind alone is not existentially satisfying.
You’re supposed to try scary things, even if you fail. You’re supposed to chase your dreams, even if it’s just for a few minutes a day. You’re supposed to dance, write, fall in love, cry, and laugh.
People might say I’m idealistic, but at least I’m not bitter.
Some people become bitter because things don’t go their way, but the life advice from bitter people usually sucks.
In my experience, being happy is directly correlated with being fulfilled, and being fulfilled is directly correlated with chasing your dreams.
And, in my experience, the work you love is always your best work.
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