About
What is the Dream Fear Project?
The Dream Fear Project is a blog featuring a collection of index cards.
On the index cards, people write their biggest dream or goal in life, as well as their biggest fear.
Not all the index cards that are submitted get posted, but they are all kept as part of the collection.
Why?
The Dream Fear project exists for two reasons.
1. To let people know that they are not alone. In everyday conversation, oftentimes even with people we are close to, it feels inappropriate or uncomfortable to share what you want to experience most and least in life. Sure we’ll talk about dreams like going on vacation or fears like being afraid of spiders, but these don’t have the potential to define your life. By sharing what people really want with their life, we hope to give people “permission” to do the same. Also we hope that by having people share their fears as well, others who feel held back or even paralyzed by similar fears will know that they are not alone in having them and that others are acting in spite of them, so they can too.
2. To encourage people to answer two of the more important questions in life.
What do I really want most? What experience do I fear the most?
The answers to the former question should among the most powerful guiding forces in our lives every day. However, it’s the latter that often can keep us from pursuing the former, and all of this being done without us even realizing it. Hopefully, this site will help people “wake up” in this sense and start to make decisions more consciously about what motivates the actions they take, and consequently determines the direction of their life.
Where did the idea come from?
Luke, a med student in Kentucky, was giving speeches in local high schools and trying to get the seniors to join a college transition mentorship program. He was having trouble figuring out how, after his speech, he could get people to sign up since he knew that any student that made it known publicly that they wanted to be mentored would be (or at least feel) singled out. Luke told his friend Denise about this and she suggested that at the end of his speech he ask the students to write their biggest dream and biggest fear down on an index card and, if they were interested in being mentored, to include their contact information so he could follow up with them. This allowed students to express their interest in the program privately.
After Luke read through a lot of the cards he began to notice themes. Many of the cards also hit him very hard. He thought, “The rest of the world should see these because I bet some of these kids think that they are the only ones feeling this way, or the only ones that have this goal, and they aren’t”. Thus the idea for what is now the Dream Fear Project was born. Luke promptly told some people about the idea and did nothing to further its manifestation for six months or so.
Where did the action come from?
Luke went to an event in Lexington, Kentucky called Startup Weekend. One goal of Startup Weekend, among others, is to start a business between Friday and Sunday. Luke was on John, Brian, and Colyn’s team and, after spending a day and ultimately giving up on an idea for something that was a business, Luke proposed the Dream Fear Project, which really isn’t a business idea. John then told a story about almost losing his son and how it took that traumatic experience to get him to realize what he really wanted most in life and what his worst nightmare actually was. He thought that perhaps the Dream Fear Project could help other people like hime come to his same realizations sooner and in a less painful and traumatic way.
Everyone that heard John’s powerful story about his son started to cry. Then they started to scan in the cards that Luke already had collected, get Startup Weekend participants to fill out cards, and modified a Wordpress Blog so that people could submit their own cards.