... is not tying your hopes for fulfillment to something that's out of your control. Of course, in a sense everything is out of your control--you could lose your home or your family to any number of terrible events, the fear of which we suppress in order to function. But what I mean is, don't make your happiness depend on something that, while it's out of YOUR control, is within the control of other people. Such as: editors, publishers, admissions officers, hiring committees, and all other finicky and fallible gatekeepers of institutions and industries. This is the darker side of that happy advice to "follow your dream," and it's something I've taken a long time learning.  

I've had plenty of lessons, though. My sister is one example: she wanted to be a doctor. She worked hard, followed her dream, and lo and behold she achieved it. She now has all the tangible and intangible rewards that go with successfully following a dream that's universally approved and applauded. But the whole thing could have crumbled if not for one acceptance letter from one medical school. Even before it came, I thought about the power of that letter: that such a cold, flimsy thing could dissolve a dream or make it real.

Meanwhile, thinking I was saving myself a lot of heartache in comparison to what my sister went through, I decided to go to graduate school. Turns out I was a complete noodlehead. After jumping through all the hoops and finally getting my PhD, I faced a dismal job market, with hundreds of over-qualified candidates for every part-time, temporary, non-tenure track position at Podunk U. So I said, forget it! and left academe altogether. This was actually not a hard a decision to make, as I'd already begun to feel I wasn't suited to the scholarly life.

A few years later, I had a regular job--the kind I'd spent my entire academic career avoiding--and was actually pretty happy with it. I was a bit bored, though, so I started to write. Soon I got totally caught up in writing fiction and decided that this was my true calling and had to be my career. I put my all into it, writing, revising, going to conferences, contacting editors, agents, publishers. Practically everything I did met with sincere praise and kind rejection--over and over, close but no cigar. After four or five years this got to be a real drag...and once again, I had to learn how stupid it was to give powerful strangers power over my happiness.

Last year I went to a conference for mystery writers and readers. I was newly self-published and hoped to learn a few things--and I did. Over and over I heard stories of persistent writers who didn't give up and were finally published. "Never give up," people kept telling me. But at the same time I was hearing other things: anxiety over sales, books going out of print, authors marketing their books so hard they never had time to write, editors pressuring them to write what would sell. And I began to think that maybe success is not really success. I was told that it usually takes seven books for a mystery author to get established with the public. I had written two, and had ideas for a third... but did I really want to write a book a year, with the same protagonist in the same setting, for five more years? The answer was no.

Well, I think I finally get it now. I don't regret what I've done--the thesis, the degree, the books--but I've stopped measuring my worth by things like acceptance letters, job offers, and publication contracts. Joseph Campbell said, "Follow your bliss," and to me that seems like better advice than "follow your dream." Because if you follow your dream, you need to make sure there's room in it for failure: that is, failure in the sense of not meeting the world's expectations or definition of success. It might turn out that your dream and your bliss don't coincide. Dreams are something always out of reach; they bump up against reality and get bruised. But happiness is simply there. If you can find it where you are--in what you're doing and not what you're striving for, for its own sake and not for anyone's approval--you'll have stopped following your dream and started living your bliss.