What I dreamed up
There is a link in my twitter (Snippets of Life) to my entry in a kind of photography contest. The contest is called Name Your Dream Assignment.
The idea is to pitch your dream photo shoot and then get people to vote for you. The top 20 popular vote ideas will go before a panel of judges. The panel will decide the ultimate winner.
I’m sitting at 103 as I write this… My Entry
Oh, there is a $50,000 prize to enable the dream shoot. The winner has to agree to share photos, but retains the ownership and copyright.
You have to sign in to vote which takes a minute or so. The reason for the sign in is to allow them to make sure you don’t vote more than once for an entry. You CAN vote for as many entries as you’d like. They say they will not use sign-in info for marketing. This is a Microsoft/Lenovo jointly sponsored contest. I believe them. I am a registered user of many Microsoft products as well as in the pool of professional technical people and I don’t get anything other than what I’ve asked for as far as communication from Microsoft.
Naturally, I’d love your vote and from any of your friends and family and even people you can wrangle in the street!
But mostly, what I’d like you to do is think about your dream – your dream of something you’d like to do, to see, to accomplish, where and how you’d like to live if it is not where and how you are doing it now. And write it down. Don’t worry about the words or grammar or spelling – just start and see where it goes.
Writing down a vision for anything is powerful. Writing down the dream, clarifies what is really important to you. Once written, the words have a way of honing your daily decisions – keeping you on track towards that thing that is important enough to you that you wrote it down. The words help you say no to some of those requests for your time that don’t help you along the way – I don’t mean things like laundry, feeding your kids, going to work – and I’m talking “some”…you will think before automatically saying yes. And you will be happier for it!
It is funny how things happen. A post from a blogging friend about the current state of affairs in the United States and concern about the direction things are going got me thinking. There are a couple of young women – self employed making various items – their blogs share how things are going with them. One thought she might need to take a “real” job, but her online shop continues to expand. There is a lot of cheering going on in her comment section as well as the others. They are doing well – on their own, doing what they love.
I got thinking about the many positive things that could come out of this time. Perspective. A need to move in with family, while possibly horrifying to contemplate initially, might turn into an opportunity to be closer. A loss of job might be the opportunity to change careers, thinking about what you really want to do. The need for a simpler existence with less stuff, less going out, might evolve into a long term way of living – more joy, less stress – simple, real values – what we all say we want.
Back to dreaming… Even if you don’t want to sign in and vote, I encourage you to go to the contest site and read some of the dream assignment entries. Many are interesting and some are inspirational. And then go write down your own dream…and see what happens.
Go! – and Write! It is a new day – Dream big!
Edited 3/14/2009. Although I absolutely believe in being clear on our dreams and hopes, I withdrew from this contest. Not many voted for one thing and I am not willing to mount a serious “campaign for votes”. The project is something I’m capable of doing on my own, something I really have been doing although not with much focus on other’s stories. I’ll continue.
