61If you go back into that state of self-confidence and
dream again, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how many
innovative and immediate solutions you come up with
to your problems.
Einstein used to say, “Imagination is more impor-
tant than knowledge.” When I first heard he’d said that,
I didn’t know what he meant. I always thought addi-
tionalknowledge was the answer to every difficult prob-
lem. I thought if I could just learn a few more important
things, then I’d be okay. What I didn’t realize was that
the very thing I needed to learn was not knowledge, but
skill. What I needed to learn was the skill of proactively
using my imagination.
And once I’d learned that skill, the first task was to
begin imagining the vision of who I wanted to be.
Songwriter Fred Knipe once wrote a song about this. It
was for the soundtrack of a video produced for teenag-
ers about how to visualize themselves succeeding at what
they wanted to do:
“That’s you / in your wildest dreams / doing the wild-
est things / no one else can do. If you / just love and keep
those dreams / the wildest dreams / you’ll make your-
self come true.”
To make ourselves come true we need to develop
the strength to dream. Dreaming, in its proactive sense,
is strong work. It’s the design stage of creating the fu-
ture. It takes confidence and it takes courage. But the
greatest thing about active dreaming is not in the even-
tual reaching of the goal—the greatest thing is what it
does to the dreamer.
Forget the literal attainment of your dream for now.
Focus on just going for it. By simply going for the dream,
you make yourself come true.
Find your inner Einstein