When I was a kid my parents would say things like, “You can do anything.” Usually my mother said these words of encouragement as I was failing at something.  The words were designed to pump me up.  Her way of saying, “Atta girl.” But whenever she said it, she made me believe that I could follow my dreams and accomplish anything I wanted. 

Of course, my mother didn’t really mean it.  Because our family couldn’t actually do anything. Like we can’t sing. And we definitely can’t dance. And pretty much my parents had no problem with us following our dreams, as long our dreams were…to be a doctor or lawyer. 

Yet, that mantra fueled my dreams about being an actress from an early age.  And my parents certainly provided the engine for my dreams. They took us to the theater all the time.  They drove me to acting classes as early as the second grade. From an early age I performed theater in all kinds of venues, including on the beach, in a bar, on a boat, and in a car (well, not a car - but Dr. Seuss was an inspiration for my dreams too). I starred in everything from The Emperor’s New Clothes in elementary school to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at the local all-boys Catholic High School (how smart am I?).  And all the while, just like the kids on Glee I dreamed of one day performing on Broadway. 

But I finally I figured out they were lying when my father, the doctor, said, “Pamela, you can’t become an actor. It’s a waste of a mind.” And so dreams dashed, I went to law school. 

But finally, after practicing law for a good long time, I ended up following my dreams anyway.  So, I’m glad I had them in the first place. My dreams buoyed me when I was a lawyer and sat bored out of my mind combing through documents in an enormous warehouse.  Or when I cried in my office when a partner ripped apart a brief I had worked on all night.  I held on to my dreams because they gave me hope that there was something better just around the corner

My husband’s parents actually encouraged his dreams. When he wanted to be a magician they bought him magic tricks and let him apprentice with a world-renowned magician who had retired to Geneva, New York.  The great magician had developed the famous linking rings and founded the International Brotherhood of Magicians.  He was getting on in years and needed an apprentice to pick up the rabbits he kept dropping.  My husband would help him and started doing his own shows at the local retirement community. 

Then my husband wanted to be a broadcaster.  In high school, he took a job at WGVA.  The 2:00 a.m.-6:00 a.m. shift. Maybe you heard him in the late ’70s playing the Allman Brothers over and over and over again? 

And that he set his sights on politics.  To support his dream, his mother charmed two White House staffers on a cruise to get him an interview to be an intern.  And he got the job.  When I met him, we talked about our dreams for our future.  Mine on Broadway and his in Washington.  Just like that old song by Harry Chapin, “she was going to be an actress, and I was going to learn to fly.” 

But then we got married and re-tooled our dreams for our real life. My Broadway became really far Off-Broadway, first in Washington and now a cornfield in Pittsford helping others to present.  His magic became turning old restaurant equipment into new equipment by remanufacturing it.  But still, we had our dreams and while we tweaked and realigned them, we still feel like we are following them every day.  

Being a dreamer, I’m fascinated by other people’s childhood dreams.  I always ask, what did you want to be when you were little? I can’t imagine my brother-in-law when he was 8 would have said, “I want to be an accountant when I grow up.” But then again…he really is the very definition of an accountant.  

But he’s fulfilled the dreams of most accountants by any standard, in that he doesn’t actually do any accounting.  He leads a global team and chairs an international accounting committee and speaks all over the world about accounting.  A rock star of accountants.  But perhaps his real dream was already fulfilled when he jumped onstage dressed as the Unknown Comic (bag and all) during a performance by Bob Hope in front of thousands of fellow students at Ohio University.  After that being an accountant was a fine dream. 

One lawyer friend, told me her teenage passion was seeing how many rules she could circumnavigate. Good skills for a lawyer it turns outs. I met a woman from Brockport in Dubai who runs a comedy school.  Did she dream of this during snowy nights in Western, New York? She too dreamed of being on Broadway. And she made it, after she accomplished that, was Dubai the logical next stop? Not really.  But circumstances brought her there and she’s making dreams of laughter in the Middle East come true.  

And then there is Cinderella.  The young woman I met who didn’t dream of working at Disney – which a lot of people do.  But she did dream of being a dancer.  Her parents were encouraging but told her she needed an education to fall back on.  Dancers have notoriously short careers.  And she even says she didn’t have what it took to compete as a dancer. But she pursued her dream any way eventually joining the dance team at her college, dancing in front of 25,000 people at basketball games. And then she heard about the Disney auditions for dancers.  They plucked her from the dancing ranks and saw a princess instead. 

It’s not quite her dream, but she says she still feels like a dancer, even when she’s standing still. But her other dreams of traveling and meeting people are also being fulfilled as she meets and greets the thousands of little girls who dream of one day being her.  Did her dreams come true? Or by having them at all, did she find new ones? I’m thinking, all of the above. 

Randy Pausch, who passed away a few years ago, delivered a moving “last lecture” at Carnegie Mellon.  He outlined his childhood dreams, among them, being Captain Kirk, playing for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and being a Disney imagineer.  He said, “It’s not about following your dreams, but about how you live your life.” Having dreams helped to form his very nature.

Saturday Night Live recently skewered a generation of dreamers on a parody talk show entitled, “You Can Do Anything -  the only show that celebrates the incredibly high self-esteem of the YouTube generation.” The hosts welcomed incredibly untalented self-promotional dreamers, with the tagline, “Now you can do anything – because - thanks to technology, it doesn’t matter if you have skills or training or years of experience.”  Encouraging a terrible singer the hosts said gleefully, “we love you because the world needs more singer-songwriters instead of doctors.“ 

While making fun of the dreamers has happened for generations, I do believe it’s having dreams at all that makes all the difference in who you are and who you can be. But that doesn’t mean you can avoid those 10,000 hours of practice that Malcolm Gladwell talks about to be successful.  

So for my kids when I tell them they can do anything, what I mean is, just do something. Most important try things, find what you like, stick to it and unlike the parody, make sure you are good at it, be aware of your limitations, and use the dreams to fuel your success in your own way.   

My daughter has taken this to the extreme. When you ask her what she wants to do when she grows up, she says she wants to do everything. She wants to be an astronaut, cupcake baker, lawyer, teacher, and artist.  And with her tenacity (read: stubbornness) I believe she will succeed at all of them.

My son’s main dream right now is to have his mother stop asking him what his dreams are.  He’s funny, bright and really could do anything (but I’m just his mother).  He’s tried acting, playing the King in The King and I, his very first time auditioning.  We joke with him, since he’s never auditioned again, he's done now, his theater career peaked in the 8th grade.  He plays trumpet in the school band and has a natural pucker, but sometimes I think he likes eating the sausage at the Jazz Festival more than listening to the music.  Right now, I do believe his life-time dream would be to play X-Box’s Call of Duty 24 hours a day.  

But I keep encouraging him and driving him to lessons and sports he’s probably not going to end up playing professionally, but I keep thinking he should try them – because - you never know.  And I let him play X-Box, because he could end up like the kid I heard speak last year at a conference, who played X-Box and then started a company that makes online video games which was sold last year…for a billion dollars.  

So, just like my parents, I tell him he can do anything…as long as he moves out and pays for himself…and maybe his old parents in time.