Today I talked to a buddy at the university about nothing in particular when this happened:
Buddy: I’d be happy if I made more money than my professor some day.
Since we study economics I assured him that he probably will if he goes in the open economy
Him: Only if I am good at what I do.
Me: Well, are you?
Him: I don’t know if I will be
Me: Well, why wouldn’t you?
Him: How would I know, I have not written any tests so far
I could not believe that he actually said and believed that. He honestly thinks his success in tests and in university in general defines his later work life!
How can our school system fuck that hard with the mind of a young person? I can’t believe that people really think that way, this is so damn limiting!
What about following your dreams, believing in your ideas? What about the passion that young people always have? If you ask a child what he wants to be when he grows up he sure as hell won’t say: I wanna be a firefighter, but therefore I have to study hard and be an honorable person.
He will reply: I want to be James Bond, I want to be a firefighter, heck I want to be a billionaire!
I don’t say that education is not important or should be taken lightly but everything has to have boundaries and if you really think your success in several years from now on depends on how well you do in some tests right now, there must be something wrong.
How great must this pressure be? If I fail now, I won’t have a good job in ten years?
Wow, do NOT, I repeat, do NOT apply this attitude to your life!
Go where you want to go and take important tasks serious but damn have fun on the way and don’t worry too much. It will all work out! It always has and it always will work out, trust me on this one.
And now go out and enjoy yourself!
/phil
Motivatingdaily - Your source for daily motivation 
“I’d be happy if…”, from my perspective, might issue a lifelong dream. What is the structure of a lifelong, or life-defining, dream? In this case, one might explicate it as “making more money than P in the future time marked as T”.
When such dreams are pursued, a certain relation is constructed between “Buddy”, their objective “more money than P” and the supposed destination indicated by T. Buddy will probably think that between their talk with Phil and T lies a span of proceedings that are necessary for the fulfilment of their objective. This follows, since if there were no proceedings required between now and the state of the objective, these two states would be identical.
One of these necessary proceedings, Buddy claims, would lie in stating the certainty of him being “good”, and a necessary proceeding for “being good” would be, Buddy claims, achieving a good mark.
These claims that Buddy uses to draw a graph between their talk to Phil and T, in which “more money than P” is the case indicate that they are already part of their lifelong, or life-defining, dream. It _is_ their dream to not only make “more money than P at T”, but also to achieve this by using the methods implicated by their claims of neccessary proceedings.
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The dream, I wanted to argue, is not entirely made up by the supposed end (T), but also by its relation to everything that is not like the state of the supposed end.
Now, you seem to offer a guideline of how achieving a dream should be done, but I can make out no conflict between:
Phil: “Go where you want to go and take important tasks serious but damn have fun on the way and don’t worry too much. It will all work out!”
Buddy: “Since my dream does not only consist of the state at T but also the proceedings between now and then, actions I pursue in order do get to be “more rich than P” belong to my dream. And since I have this dream for the sake of having fun / being happy, everything that belongs to my dream is fun to me.”
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Buddy names a method. Formulated unbound, it could look like:
My dream will become into existence as soon as I have done 1,…,n.
Now, if they had said that their method was to “have fun on the way”, this post might never have come into existence and I wonder why.
I agree.
My point was not to point out that he is not following his dreams. I think he is since he studies something he likes and has hobbies he loves.
What I wanted to point out is the nonsense of defining ones later success with benchmarks in the present.
You can not conclude how succesfull in whatever way one will be some day by looking at current achievements.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment 🙂