On Dreams Looking Different Than You Think
Austria
For a long time, I half-dreamed that one day I would work for an international company. The travel! The cultural diversity! The scope of work!
But life did not exactly happen the way I thought it would. I fell in love with recruiting, and those jobs are harder to find at scale internationally. Second, I had babies :) and juggled being a mom and building a career at the same time.
So time passed, and eventually that dream went on the back burner. No one was more surprised than me a few years ago when we started working more and more with international clients putting down roots here in the Carolinas. Now that is one of Forge’s core specialties—working with German, Italian, French, and Japanese companies who are expanding in the U.S.
And this summer, I had the opportunity to go overseas and visit many of their European headquarters. It was truly a life-changing experience—not just traveling internationally solo (there are for sure some stories there!), but the real experiences were this:
eating dinner in our clients’ homes with their families after visits to the bakery and the butcher,
navigating the German Autobahn (I’m all for no speed limit!),
surviving no air-conditioning (that is definitely life-changing, let me tell you!),
finding a last minute opera ticket in Munich and crying through it (yes, I did),
wandering the Viktualienmarkt—the tomatoes! the peaches! the cheese! the pretzels!,
going for a run around Lake Annecy and drinking coffee afterward with my feet dangling in the water,
hauling my suitcase through France in 95- heat,
seeing the sun rise in Deggendorf (with church bells at 6 am),
watching the World Cup with a bunch of locals in Bavaria,
touring manufacturing and distribution plants,
learning you say “Servus!”in some parts of Germany but not in others . . .
and last but not least, the incredible experience of hiking the Dolomites with a dear friend and colleague who used to work for Forge before moving back to Italy.
And about halfway through the trip, I realized that I actually do work for an international company. It’s just one I built myself—with a lot of blood, sweat, tears, and support from the people I love.
The dream did not come about the way I thought it would. And you could even argue that it’s not an international company in the true sense of the word (but who’s counting?). ;)
But I have begun to realize that dreams rarely are born the way we imagine. Because life happens, and people happen, and dreams die, but they can be reborn in a new way.
One of the hardest things in life, I think, is to have the stamina and grit to not give up on your dreams. Because they probably will not happen the way you think they will. They may need to be reformulated, reimagined, and recast. You will most certainly need to approach them in a different manner. And they will probably take far more work than you ever imagined.
But call me naive—I know I am— but I believe dreams can still come true, just in a different way than you might think.
Is that better? Worse? I’m not sure. I don’t think we’ll ever know. But what I do know is that we have to keep on building towards our dreams. Because — just maybe — the building process is what shapes us into the person we are meant to be.
Don’t give up on your dreams. They matter.
How are you pursuing your dreams today?