If You Can Dream It You Can Do It!

Excerpted from
Success Is Never Ending, Failure Is Never Final
By Robert H. Schuller

ANYBODY can dream! ANYBODY can plan! As it says in the song, "When you wish upon a star, makes NO DIFFERENCE WHO YOU ARE!"

Success will be never ending and failure will never be final for those people who have the capacity to dream.

In 1955 when I arrived in California to begin a church, only two miles away Walt Disney was burning orange trees to build a place called Disneyland. On my wall I have this line from my celebrated neighbor: "Somehow I can't believe there are many heights that can't be scaled by a man who knows the secret of making dreams come true. This special secret can be summarized in four C's. They are: curiosity, confidence, courage, and constancy, and the greatest of these is confidence."

Walt Disney knew the secret of making his dreams come true. It's possible for you to make yours come true too!

Everything starts, of course, with an idea or a dream. Everybody has ideas pass through their minds. The only difference is what they do with those ideas.

The truth is that many of you have seen someone do something great and thought, "How did they do that?"

Perhaps you had the idea, too, but you did nothing about it. The great people are no different from you or me; they simply grabbed a great idea before it disappeared into oblivion. They took an option out on it. They wrote it down so they wouldn't forget it. It became a dream. Then, intuitively or through training, they learned how to make their dreams come true. They had the four C's!

You Can Dream-If You Have CURIOSITY!

What single quality do we find in the mental activity of all dreamers and doers? "Creative curiosity." Curiosity is the dynamic portion of the mind that provokes the questions that release creativity.

For millenia people sat under trees, only to have apples fall and hit them on the head. For millenia the human response was predictable:

"Ouch!"

Or, "Gosh! What an apple!"

Then one day, according to the legend, a man was hit on the head by an apple, and he responded with creative curiosity. He asked, "Why? Why did the apple fall down instead of rising up and floating away like a cloud, a feather, or a leaf? Why do leaves fly away while apples fall down?"

That curiosity led Newton to discover the law of gravity!

In the twenty years since I wrote my "textbook," Move Ahead with Possibility Thinking, I have received responses from thousands of persons who tried Possibility Thinking and found that it released the capacity to be creative! Curiosity turned them into problem solvers and decision makers.

You Can Dream-If You Have COURAGE!

Jeb Stuart was a loyal follower of General Robert E. Lee. He was a courageous officer and a man of integrity who always signed his letters to the general, "You can count on me, Jeb."

Frankly, that's the commitment I've made to my God who gives me positive ideas. I have prayed, "If You will entrust the dream to me, Lord, You can count on me! I won't let it fly away. I'll do something with it. I will give it the best that I can!"

Courage? Yes. Integrity? Absolutely! I spell courage, I-N-T-E-G-R-I-T-Y, for courage is really honesty. When you see someone who's operating with real courage, they are actually exhibiting integrity. They have to do what they're doing or they would be disloyal. I hope you will come to believe, as I do, that our dreams are entrusted to our care and keeping by God-with the obligation to turn ideas into creative action. Then, as an honest trustee, you will be so motivated by integrity that you'll have no place for fear.

I learned this lesson as a child growing up on a farm where we raised milk cows. They had to be milked every morning and every night without a single exception! "Come hell or high water," as the farmers put it. No matter what! And it was my chore to milk. No problem ever got in the way of doing what I had to do.

Call that responsibility. Call it accountability. It adds up to integrity. And integrity leaves little room for fear. And when that negative emotion threatens, turn it into a positive force.