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25. What it actually feels like to turn a dream into a business
The pros and cons of turning a dream into a business
There is no shortage of advice out there about how to turn your dreams into reality.
I don’t know about you, but I was always more interested in a slightly different question: What does it actually feel like when a dream turns into a real business?
Prior to starting Bonfire, I could only wonder. My references came from the genre of how-we-built-this podcasts and books, the kinds of media that narrate the journey from someone’s seed of an idea to their eventual behemoth of a business. In these stories, every dreamer-turned-builder either seemed like the happiest person on earth or the most stressed. Sometimes both.
In a way, this duality of happiness and stress felt freeing. There was no one single feeling – good or bad, happy or stressful – that happens when dreams convert to reality. It’s nuanced and complex and different for everyone. Now that we’ve taken the dream-leap with Bonfire, I can confirm: Our story is unlike any of the other stories I heard throughout the years, which is due in part to our avoidance of most traditional business advice, sure, but also because the dream conversion experience is different for everyone. Yours will be different than ours. Ours is different than Adam Neumann’s (thank goodness). Etc.
In fact, I now believe that, rather than a discrete set of feelings that mark the turning of a dream into a business, the change is much more akin to a mindset shift. We business makers differ in our feelings of happiness or stress or peace or joy. But we all share a similar shift from a state of before to after.
Broadly-speaking, here’s how I’ve experienced the mindset evolution. (Notice that not all the things listed below are opposites of each other; many are just points along a spectrum.)
Moving from dream to reality …
Someday → Today
Freedom → Agency
What if → How about
Wonder → Experience
Free of consequence → Highly interrelated
Exciting → Rewarding
Surreal → Hyper-real
Pinch me → Pay me
Ideal → Messy
When → How
There is no good or bad here. Just … different.
Life might be calling you to lean more into the dream for now and the business later, or vice versa.
This mindset shift has manifested in a few tangible ways for me, more like an actual pros and cons list – though, again, no judgment on any of the outcomes, just observation. Here are some of the takeaways after a few months of living the dream at Bonfire. Take particular note of #5 on the pros list: After turning a dream into a business, I’ve definitely not stopped dreaming!
The pros of turning a dream into a business
1 - You eliminate the what-ifs
For a short time, I dreamed of running a marathon. Then I started training for this marathon, I realized that my body craved more of a corpse-pose-yoga kind of activity, and I turned my attention to other things. But, had I never attempted any running of any sort, I would have always wondered, “What if … “
It’s the same feeling with dreams of starting your own thing. Once you actually start the thing, it’s like you’ve finally scratched that itch that’s been so hard to scratch. You’ve checked that little box that’s been left open in your head – and oh what a relief! You no longer have to wonder what it’s like because you’re living what it’s like.
2 - You become a living, breathing gratitude exercise
Quite often, I dream about big, impossible things. So the fact that some of my dreams even have the possibility of coming true is a gift in and of itself – a gift of privilege, of circumstance, of luck, of timing. A gift of serendipity.
And now that a dream of mine has turned into a real business, I have a very tangible thing to remind me every day of how fortunate I am to be able to wake up and work on a thing that I’ve dreamed about and wished for. Of course, there are plenty of times when I am forgetfully and regrettably ungrateful – usually when I’m doing menial tasks I don’t love and never dreamed about doing (see “cons” below) – but the overwhelming majority of time is spent turning my attention to gratitude.
3 - You make real impact
As long as a business dream remains a dream, there’s never going to be real-world impact, no matter how world-changing the idea. This seems obvious, of course, but it takes on added meaning once you have put your dream into the world and have started receiving feedback and hearing from others and working with people to make their lives just a little better (which is why most businesses should exist, right?).
4 - You create more room for creativity (and new dreams)
Whether you know it or not, that dream of yours is taking up a lot of space in your head. Getting it out into the real world clears room for more creativity, more inspiration, more reflection, and even more dreams (see the next point).
5 - You don’t have to stop dreaming
This might be the one takeaway that has surprised me the most. At Bonfire, we have absolutely not stopped dreaming now that the business is live. In fact, we might dream even more than before!
Part of this is intentional: Both Shannon and I are dreamers, and we dedicate time to big-picture thinking. Another part of it, though, is that once you have a real business, you become aware of all the different things you could actually be doing with your business. Your horizons expand; you have more learnings and more data and more confidence about what to try next and where you want to be in the future.
The cons of turning a dream into a business
1 - You bring financial realities into the equation
One of the nicest things about dreams is that they are ethereal; they don’t need to be grounded in reality. But businesses definitely do!
The most obvious reality check for me is the finances. Balance sheets and tax prep and unit economics were definitely not things I dreamed about prior to starting a business. The work of bringing a dream to life is exactly that: work. And work sometimes entails the details, the logistics, the infrastructure, and the tasks that you don’t bother thinking about when your business is just an idea.
2 - The thing you love now is the thing that pays you (aka pressure!)
You’ve probably heard it said that you should never turn a hobby into a job because once your hobby is responsible for paying the bills, it loses all its joy, relief, and pleasure. Business ownership brings pressure. Some days the pressure is light, and other days it’s heavy. But the nature of the work you’re doing to keep the pressure at bay is something you likely never dreamed of before: operational logistics, pounding the pavement for sales, doing double-entry accounting.
3 - Everyone will have an opinion
You can keep your dreams to yourself. You cannot keep your business to yourself. Therefore, once you make the switch from dream to business, you are inviting people to react to your business idea. Much of the time, this will actually feel like a good thing – particularly if you launch a business in front of a lot of your friends and loved ones. As time goes on, though, you’ll certainly have your fair share of people smiling and nodding at your cute little ambitions, which they do not at all understand or appreciate.
Over to you
What are you dreaming about doing one day, and what are your biggest questions and curiosities about how it will go? We’d love to hear from you – and to give you some words of encouragement. The other side of dreaming is pretty great, too!
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