The Three Axioms Of Life

I remember coming home from school, excited for the first time in my life about learning. My fifth grade class was studying ancient civilizations and I was fascinated by the stories of Mesopotamia. I could not wait to tell my father what I wanted to be when I grew up. I found him on the couch and I told him in no uncertain terms that I was going to be an archeologist one day. He looked at me blankly and said, “How much money do they make?” Deflated into silence, I shrugged my shoulders and walked away. We never spoke of my dream again. For most of my life I have considered his reaction to be cold and borderline mean. I always wondered why he didn’t just smile, support my dream, and take me to a museum.

It has been a long time since my father choked on my dream. However, through times of success and failure I have remained a dreamer. Over the years I have come to the realization that there is a stark difference between a fantasy and a dream. A fantasy is something wished for and waited on, a dream is something to be pursued with a plan. The question is, how can one actively pursue a dream? I have come up with a plan, I call it “The Three Axioms of Life”. These are the three: celebrate uniqueness and in that celebration discover specific talents, honor those talents with hard work, and make decisions based an outcome that will expand not contract future opportunity.

In celebrating uniqueness it becomes possible to embrace individuality which will then produce a mindset of self-love and appreciation. This process allows for personal comfort and a sense of freedom to create an individually tailored life-path. A path that is not preordained by circumstance, but one that is based on a specific set of talents and skills. Life now becomes a journey of self awareness, designed for the pursuit of the dream. Once individual talents have been discovered they must be honored with hard work. This work will be rewarding and exciting because it will continually nurture and support individuality. In short, it will create the real chance for the dream to come to fruition. Once the true self is defined and skills are implemented, a course of action can be plotted and aimed at an ever expanding personal horizon. It is a simple equation of analysis: actions must enhance, never diminish future opportunity. Each decision, with interim goals as guidance, must create a positive step toward the achievement of the ultimate dream.

With these three axioms in mind, progress can be achieved in a state of intrinsic happiness. While accolades and praise will always be welcome, they will cease to be an ongoing necessity for a consistent sense of self-worth to exist. Personal risk will be greatly diminished simply because a moment of failure will no longer define final value. Instead it will merely be a small mis-step to be learned from and moved past. Peer pressure will have little or no effect because day-to-day life will be an ongoing, relentless honing of skills. On the journey toward a dream, it is inevitable that a supportive peer group will form that will buttress an individual sense of ever-growing self-belief. The emersion into this liked-minded community of people will create a positive trajectory forward and defend against debilitating negativity. This elevated state of being creates a fertile ground for the dream to come true. Simultaneously, the happiness and success that is created by this positive lifestyle will give rise to a unique and authentic existence.

I now know that in that short conversation with my father so many years ago, he was not trying to be cold or mean. My father was a child of the Depression, and of WWII. He was a hard working blue collar man. His life was consumed by working and providing which left him very little time to spend on his own personal dreams. His view of the world was firmly rooted in the basic realities of life, and in his mind, everything else was fantasy. Looking back it is somewhat ironic that, although he kept his head down, singularly focused almost entirely on working and providing, and never embracing the value of dreaming, his approach to life gave me the freedom to stare out at my own personal horizon and dream. So in the end, thanks Dad.