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Cheryl Strayed: Don't Let Your Dreams Ruin Your Life

CC | tv-14
At the age of 33, author Cheryl Strayed rented a cottage in the town of Sheffield, Massachusetts, hoping to finish writing her book. It had been her lifelong desire to write the great American novel, but now that she was so close, she found herself procrastinating and watching TV instead. She started to feel like a failure. "I had my dream in my grasp, and I was too weak to hold it," she says. "It was too hard. It was too big. I was too much of a failure to see it through. What do you do if you've aimed so high and aspired to be the best and all of that stuff that I was doing and realize that you just—you can't—you're a failure. What happens when we have only ourselves to blame?"

In that humbling moment, Cheryl was forced to ask herself a hard question: Had she set the bar too high for herself? "That is when you have to ask yourself, you know, not—not who you aspire to be. But to reckon with who you actually turn out to be. Who you actually are. And what I realized, what humility taught me, is that I couldn't, any longer, adhere to the narratives that had gotten me this far. I had to relinquish all of those anthems of greatness and dreaming big and aiming high. All of those beautiful, powerful, important things that had really gotten me there. They weren't serving me anymore. And so I had to come up with something that would."

Cheryl realized that she needed to get realistic about her dream, and aim at something more attainable. "I knew I was going to fall short of greatness. So I had to re-write the story of what greatness was. I had to figure out how to measure success differently. And I also had to figure out what purpose dreams served, if they served them at all. Maybe—maybe part of what was getting in my way was those very dreams. Don't Let your dreams ruin your life. Forget the greatness. I had to write a book. And I had to surrender to the idea of my own mediocrity."

Here, Cheryl explains why you shouldn't let your dreams get in the way of achieving your goals.