Hi,
The Dream’s trance keeps us dancing. It’s not a happy dance. It’s the one we resign ourselves to when we chase The Dream.
The Dream pushes us around the dance floor. At times it’s a frantic dance to keep up with The Dream’s pace. Other times it’s a slow, numbing shuffle, with our head nodding toward the floor.
Regardless of the pace, we’re trapped in The Dream’s trance. I see it in my co-working place. We’re hunched over our computers, face 6 inches from our laptop, speaking at the screen during a video chat.
We race around the room, “too busy” to look up, make eye contact and/or other human contact. Other times we’re pacing around a conference room with headphones on, talking to our invisible Dance partners, planning our next steps, as if they may be our last, unless we get them perfect.
At the rare times we acknowledge that The Dream dance is draining us, we shuffle across the floor to Friday. TGIF gives us hope that the dance may end, at least until The Dream shows up on Monday to start dragging us around the dancefloor again.
The dance and trance prevent us from thinking or seeing clearly. We become convinced that dancing the dance in The Dream’s trance is the only way.
It’s what we must do. There’s no other choice.
So we resign ourself to the Dream as our dance partner and try and follow its lead, no matter how uncomfortable it is. Our partner rewards us with symbols of its approval here and there to keep the trance in place.
Because immediately after we receive this reward, we start anticipating the next one, then the one after that…
When the lights come on at the dance’s end, we’re so exhausted that all we can do is follow The Dream off the dance floor, into the car The Dream’s provided, to the Dream-approved home and crash into bed.
The Dream wakes us up early the next day to do it all over again, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, over a lifetime. The Dream never tires of its dance.
Keeping us trapped in its trance ensures that we never do either. Or at least we don’t notice we do, until The Dream’s extracted as many dances from us as it can. We retire from the dance floor, spent, broken and exhausted.
By the time we notice this, we don’t even notice The Dream’s found a newer and younger dance partner in the never ending line of aspiring Dream chasers.
How about you? Are you dancing the dance in The Dream’s trance?
Would you even know if you were?
Let me know by replying directly to this email. I respond to every reply.
Catch you soon,
Chris
P.S. - I’ve been building Chainflow for the past 2.5 years. Last week I started a co-founder search. You can see who I feel the right co-founder is here. Please contact me if you’re interested or pass the post along to someone who might be 🙏
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Current Reading List
My Seditious Heart, Arundhati Roy
Dare to Lead, Brene Brown
The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World by Dalai Lama XIV, Desmond Tutu, Douglas Carlton Abrams
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
Current Playlist
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