The Gospel According to Michelle and the Bullshit of “The Dream X____”

As I was surfing the internet last night, I came across an advertisement promising I could save for retirement AND send my children to their “dream” college.

This is was opposite of click-bait for me. I couldn't read further.

I'm all in favor of people having dreams, but we need to scrap this whole idea of the Dream House, the Dream Job, the Dream College, etc. and replace it with the Good Enough House, the Very Nice Job, or the Pretty Good College. The focus of "Dream" implies that there is only one home, job or college that is perfect and everything else is less than, which is a load of crap. There are plenty of nice places to live, nice places to work, and nice places to go to college. Sure, we only live in one place, work at one job (except for people who need to work two or more jobs) and go to one college, so picking the right one is important. But there can be many good options, and they all could be right.

Think of these things as if they were dessert. Let's assume you like chocolate. You can choose from tiramisu or chocolate cake. Both are good. Is one a "Dream Dessert?" and the other a loser dessert? No. If you like both and you pick one, will you be okay with either? Sure.

I was walking to work this morning from the bus and was talking to my new friend, Slats. He works in higher education, and we talked about how the status of colleges is so influential in terms of where kids want to go. But is status necessary? For him, the status of a school implies you are buying an education, not earning it through hard work. With the emphasis on status, kids look at a college in terms of what it can do for them, not what they bring to the school community to make it a better place.

Which brings me to Michelle Obama and her new book, Becoming, which is awesome so far. She went to law school and was working in a big firm when she met Barack, who challenged all of her assumptions about what it meant to be successful. Even though he was wicked smart, he focused more on what he could contribute to the world rather than what it would give to him. Michelle began to doubt if law firm life was right for her, and was looking for a new path (page 146):

"I was realizing that the next phase of my journey would not simple unfold on its own, that my fancy academic degres weren't going to automatically lead me to fulfilling work. Finding a career as opposed to a job wouldn't just come from perusing the contact pages of an alumni directory; it required deeper thought and effort. I would need to hustle and learn."

I won't deny that fancy academic degrees open doors for people, but more important than that is "hustle," as Michelle says. Everyone--fancy school or not--needs to figure out their own path, and that will be a greater source of happiness and success, as we each define happiness and success on our own terms.

Which brings me back to Dreams Homes, Colleges and Jobs, and my conversation with Slats this morning. More of life--house, colleges, and jobs--is what we bring to it, instead of what it brings to us. I can find a dream house and never paint it or take care of it. I can go to my dream school and party away four years. I can find my dream job and become a slacker. Suddenly, those things aren't so dreamy. They lose their shine and appeal. Or, we can take a good enough house and plant flowers and paint and bake cookies and have friends over. We can go to a really nice college and have lots of friends and take interesting classes and attend campus events. Much of life is what we chose it to be.