Tag: dreamers

Last week, while visiting a job site with a business associate, an unexpected moment unfolded—one that has been echoing inside me ever since. We were talking through project details when an unhoused gentleman approached. Nothing unusual in a city where gentrification collides daily with poverty. But what came next unraveled some of the lines we tend to draw between people. Both men’s face lit up—not with friction, but with recognition. Turns out, they grew up just a few houses apart. Same block. Same neighborhood. Same era. I couldn’t help but ask what many might think but not say aloud: “What made the difference?” One man with homes in multiple cities, running quite lucrative ventures across several sates. The other, navigating life on the streets. He didn’t hesitate. “Attitude,” he said. That was a common answer. One that I actually expected. The kind of thing you hear in seminars or printed on coffee mugs. But it didn’t sit well enough with me for a number of reasons so I pressed further. That’s when he said it…

“It’s make-believe.”

“Make-believe.” I repeated the words. He went on, “Make-believe. I make believe I can do something or be something… and then I just start working toward it and make it real. It’s all made up anyway— laws, the dollar values, titles, cities, streets, and names. So I just make believe and do it.” We both chuckled at the way he made is sound so simple. But then… it hit me, feeling like home. Make-believe is the same tool we wield freely as children before the world tells us what is and isn’t possible. The same gift that built spaceships out of cardboard boxes and kingdoms out of yard dirt. Pillows became forts and sticks transformed into swords. Towels became superhero capes billowing in the wind as we charged through the house, out the door and leaped from the front porch in that brief airborne glory of flight. It is in so many ways the same energy I now use as a creative. I imagine what doesn’t exist yet—and then bring it into the world out of a blank canvas, a sheet or paper, or a wall…or whatever else.

It’s not pretending really, it’s a form of creating. It’s so easy to think of imagination or daydreaming as child’s play, but what if it’s actually the cornerstone of everything real? What is money, after all, but a mutually agreed-upon myth of perceived value? A green piece of paper backed by our belief. What is a city but a series of stories and structures laid out in grids and street signs activated by someone’s rules of the game? What is a career, a title, a boundary—except a fictitious outline agreed upon by the masses? Just food for consideration here.

The difference between one person and another, between despair and drive, between stagnation and growth, might just be one’s willingness to believe in the invisible long enough to build it. Make-believe. That’s what creatives do. That’s what visionaries do. That’s what children do. Then we grow up. Perhaps that’s what we’ve lost in the vainglorious grind of adulting: the sacred skill of making believe. But here’s the beautiful twist—I’ve come to understand that the artist and the entrepreneur, the educator and the dreamer, the activist and the builder—all require the same core recipe: imagination infused with intention, carried by action.

We imagine.
We believe.
We begin.
We become.

So next time someone dismisses “make believe” as a childish thing, we can smile and nod… knowing full well that the world we live in—every towering building, every invention, every institution, political or otherwise—once lived only in someone’s imagination. It’s all made up. So, if we don’t like the world we live in, just like someone made us believe in the this one, let’s craft another more equitable one of our choosing. Our inner world would be a great place to start.