The Dreamer’s Discipline

This ones for my girl Hannah...

For as long as I can remember, I’ve lived partly in the real world and partly in the world just behind my eyelids.....the one where everything begins.

Every pursuit I’ve ever taken on....rugby, martial arts, playing the guitar, acting, building, travelling, singing (I could go on).....started first as an image, a flicker of possibility. I would see something that caught my attention....the grace of a sidestep, the tone of a guitar string, the calm authority of someone who knew what they were doing.....and then I’d see myself doing it. I’d step into that vision and live it long before it ever happened.

That’s how I’ve always learned.....by imagining. I watch, I dream, I feel, and then I move.

It’s not a plan so much as a quiet, unspoken certainty that if I can picture it, I can build it....step by step, skill by skill, moment by moment. I’ve never been daunted by the scale of anything. I just move forward at a steady pace, knowing that consistent movement always beats grand intentions.

Some people call that focus, others might call it obsession. To me, it’s faith....not in luck or fate, but in the process itself.

And yet, there’s a strange truth that shadows it all.... once I reach competence, I often let go. I move on. It’s not failure or boredom it’s that my joy lives in becoming, not being. The climb stirs something deeper in me than the summit ever could.

There are only two pursuits that have lasted the distance.....surfing and mountain biking. I think I know why. Both are wild, fluid, alive. They never allow mastery. Every wave, every trail asks for your full attention....a dialogue between chaos and control, courage and surrender. You don’t conquer them.....you enter them.

Those two things keep me grounded, humbled, and awake. Everything else....the guitar, the building, the martial arts....they’ve all been teachers, temporary ones. They gave me what I needed at the time, then quietly stepped aside.

I used to wonder if that made me undisciplined, if my inability to stay with one thing forever meant something was missing in me. But I’ve come to see it differently. There are artists of mastery, and there are artists of motion. I belong to the latter.

My craft isn’t the skill itself....it’s the act of learning. My discipline isn’t repetition.... it’s renewal.

I think a lot of us carry dormant dreams that we dismiss as childish or unrealistic. But the truth is, every human achievement began as a daydream in someone’s head. Every song, every invention, every world shaping idea started as a flicker of imagination that someone refused to ignore.

Imagination is not escape....its blueprint. The world you can see behind your eyelids is not fantasy.... it’s instruction.

And yet, most people stop there. They imagine, but they don’t move. They doubt themselves out of the process before it even begins. They let the dream stay abstract, rather than allowing it to be the seed of something tangible.

But that’s where life’s real magic hides.....in the bridge between the imagined and the real. You don’t need certainty to cross it. You just need to take the first small, imperfect step.

If you can hold the vision of yourself doing something....really see it, feel it, believe it....then you’ve already built the first structure in your mind. The rest is just patience, grit, and time.

We all have that capacity....the quiet power to dream something into being.

So don’t talk yourself out of what you’ve been seeing. Don’t let the weight of practicality kill the wildness that whispers to you when you’re half awake.

If you’ve been picturing yourself painting, running, writing, building, healing....it’s not a fantasy. It’s a message. It’s your mind reminding you that you are not done yet.

The future version of you already exists. You’ve seen him. You’ve felt him. All that’s left is to walk toward him.

One step at a time.