Why dreams should matter more than goals

Don’t kill your vibe

Hi there,

Happy New Year ❤️

I had an epiphany after writing Tuesday’s short essay, more specifically this sentence:

It’s when we let goals dictate our actions, that I think we lose the part that made us want to pursue the arts in the first place.

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Ps. Don’t you just love when your essays serve as prompts for the next one… Damn it’s so satisfying.

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The sentence refer to the suggestion that our culture’s obsession with goal-orientation has a negative impact on sustainable artistry. Where, for the latter, I argue that we must follow dreams over goals to enjoy the process and not burn out.

This leads us to the latest epiphany:

The more goal oriented we are as opposed to dream driven, the quicker we judge our artistic process and success (mostly, lack thereof) as a failure (and we feel miserable and want to give up).

Let’s give a concrete example;

How many times have you tried a new strategy to market or sell your art, only to decide within a week or two that said strategy isn’t working for you?

Or let’s be generous, you tried it for three months, but it still doesn’t work and you feel depleted. Of course! I would too!

By the way, here’s what Steven Pressfield says about the impact of the drop-in drop-out approach for the creative muse:

The Muse wants commitment. She demands a long-term contract. She wants us to sign in blood and hang in from now to the finish line. The Muse hates one-and-done. She will not tolerate weekend warriors or drop-ins. If we’re in, we’re in for the duration.

Now let’s ask ourselves this instead:

If you were dream driven would you have tried the gut wrenching strategy in the first place (the one a business guru told you), or would you have blocked the noise and just gone about with your obsession (making art) and sharing it in whatever way that comes natural…?

I’ll tell you something.

For the soon decade that I’ve lived off my art and creativity the pattern is crystal clear:

When I work on arbitrary goals, I slowly slide away from my innate process. It’s like my artist soul slowly leaves to give space to the structured do-it-this-way person and it always flops in the long run.

On the other hand, the time I’ve followed my passions and dreams, my work exploded. When I started to share my art on Instagram I didn’t have a plan or goal. I had a dream. And I committed to the muse.

That dream brought me close to 500k followers across platforms, but stagnated as soon as I hit the ”Shit, this is real I got to be smart now” stage, which made me try to manipulate the muse from irrational to an obeying slave.

Focus went from dreamland and joy to goal supporting metrics.

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Substack, the most recent example is the same. I started with a dream. Applied the process that allowed me to grow on other socials, which was:

• Do what’s fun!

• Be human

• Connect

• Show up

• Don’t overthink

I already wrote about how becoming a bestseller in June did something to my brain and I suddenly felt I had to become professional. Well, I’ve stagnated since. It feels shameful to admit, but I hope my muse will regain her trust in me as I deepen my commitment to the dream.

Strategy and optimization has its place, yes. But not all the time.

If every piece of content has to have the weight of ”this got to move the needle forward for xyz goal (read:metric), you’ll feel so much pressure to create that content that it’ll wreck you and kill the fun (and then, what’s the point?).

It’s not for nothing that former influencers or people who’ve managed large audiences talk about the ”content hamster wheel by one’s own design”.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve received the question; But what do I share?

To which I want to scream: Anything!!

Are you excited about it? Great! Share it!

I’ve seen a note circulate recently, (but which I’ve forgotten who wrote first) with the sentiment ”make it exist first and perfect it later”.

When we’re too goal oriented, we don’t want to fix something later. We want to fix it in advance to speed up the process to reach our goals. How unromantic? How realistic!

Screw that.

I’m like bubbling writing at this point, because I know the frustration too well. When we want something so badly, we desperately try to employ every little tweak and trick to reach it and nothing seems to work… and miraculously, every single fucking time, it starts working when we finally let go.

Why is it so hard to stay dreamers?

Because we’re taught that dreams don’t come true for regular folks like you and me (they do!). AND (this is my personal belief), dreams are unquantifiable, which is a big NO NO for our logic oriented (goal and metric based) society.

How do you measure a dream? You don’t. You feel it and that’s exactly what matters most.

When you pursue dreams you feel the butterflies swirling in your stomach every time you hit publish. They fly with a sense of liberation that you’re in the right track. When you pursue dreams, the metrical data doesn’t matter, because you’re doing the thing.

A quick sketch I did yesterday morning of a dreamy terrace eating area… yum 🤤

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To come back to the theory that we judge our actions quicker when being too goal oriented…

Something else I’ve noticed through the years, is how it [anything] rarely makes sense until years later. For example, the SEO gurus would say ”build backlinks, build backlinks”.

So we did, my husband and I.

Nothing. Silence. Was it working? No clue.

But we made sure to add a link back to our website whenever we shared stuff online (Pinterest and YouTube especially).

Now, many years later, the thousands of links that we put out into the digital void brings new people to our art business every single day.

Had we not been dream driven, but goal oriented to reach a certain target within a specific timeframe, we would’ve given up the back link stuff long before it had yielded any results.

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I guess what I want to say is:

Don’t feel ashamed for being a dreamer. Don’t feel ashamed for pursuing a dream that isn’t clear yet. It’ll get clearer until new elusive dreamy dreams fill in and we keep going, keep dreaming.

Block out whatever noise that tells you that you have to set a specific goal within a specific time frame, because your creative muse will most likely make you suffer from it in the long term.

Rome wasn’t built in one day, was it?

We constantly hear of online business people who built massive businesses within no time. But this is art. This is different.

We’re not building a business for the purpose of money. We’re building a business for the purpose of the art itself. Because money will do nothing to the artist but buy more time to create more art, potentially in a more comfortable setting. Though if focus is the money, the beauty of the art will slowly fade away.

Let’s be real; Whether you live off your art today or not, would you keep doing it if nobody paid? I dare to say, yes.

Hell yes, I would!!

I can’t imagine a life without making art no matter where life takes me. So, let art be the dream and more people will most likely gravitate towards that dream compared to some other goal-focused-mr-everybody.

Like I said; You can fix it later, make it exist first.

Stay obsessed with making.

Cheers to a dreamy 2025 where we follow our guts in a world that tries to fill it with fluff✨

Elin, xx

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Welcome to Follow Your Gut, a newsletter for the dreamers about the artist life and business from a soon decade long independent career. By me 👋🏼 Elin Petronella, artist, writer and mother of 2 🥰

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