The most successful people envision themselves doing more and becoming more.
I’M JUST a deejay but I’ve always been a big dreamer. Some of my dreams have come true, some haven’t; but I believe dreaming big has helped me reach my goals. When I was a little boy growing up in Tuskegee, Alabama, I loved to watch a popular television show called The Millionaire. The show’s main character was this guy who worked for a multimillionaire and his job each week was to give away to some unsuspecting person a check for $1 million. I never missed an episode, but I would get frustrated because I always thought I could do a better job at distributing that money! For some reason, the recipients of the $1 million would find a way to mess the money up. I would go to bed thinking if I had that $1 million, I would know what to do with it. I was positive that I wouldn’t blow it. I’d drift off to sleep with a smile on my face as I dreamed about how I would spend it. I’ve been dreaming ever since.
The most successful people envision themselves doing more and becoming more, so don’t ever let anyone tell you that dreaming (envisioning) is a waste of time. Dreaming allows you to think outside of the box. You have to be able to imagine what things could be like beyond the situation you are currently in. Until you do, you will be more likely to settle for the status quo. There are people who are perfectly fine going along day to day taking whatever life hands them—I’m not one of them.
The town I was raised in was full of big dreamers. In fact, most of the people who came to Tuskegee came there in the first place following a dream to improve their lives. Men like my daddy came there with hopes and dreams of becoming Tuskegee Airmen, which was the first group of black men to fly airplanes for the U.S. military. He didn’t make it but he gave it a good try, and he’d tell you all about it if you asked him. But you’d better pull up a chair and get yourself a glass of sweet tea. It’s a long story!
Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, had to have been a big dreamer. Here’s a man who was born into slavery. When he became president of Tuskegee Institute in 1881, the school barely existed, but thanks to his fund-raising efforts it became one of the leading facilities for educating blacks in the country. When you hear a story like that you just want to walk up to some lazy, whining, black folks and slap them right across the head.
Rosa Parks, who was born in Tuskegee, must have had a dream to be treated with respect by white folks. What some people may not realize is the day she refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man wasn’t the first time she had been treated poorly by white folks. As a child she was threatened and yelled at by parents of white children for trying to protect herself and her little brother from bullies. That was back around 1920. So, by the time 1955 rolled around I’m thinking Ms. Parks was ready to take on the white bus driver and anybody else. That action led to the 381-day Montgomery bus boycott and the civil rights movement was born.
