I have been talking about an importance of each person having a Big Dream and Vision and Plan and Drive to make it happen. It is important to get to know yourself, your people, your environment and align somehow their dreams to the organization’s vision and success. You need to get to know the people who interact and work with and for you. I spend a lot of time with people one on one, during team events and in other settings. I learn about their personality, preferences and their families. I always ask people, “What is your Big Dream?” or “Is there anything special or interesting about yourself that people may not know?” During one of my conversations, a colleague shared that his dream was to support a school in his hometown. My response was that’s not a dream, that’s an action item. Take action. Just do it. What’s holding you back? A dream should be so big that it is daring. A big part of the dream is envisioning how to make it happen. I ask people, my team, where will you be in five, ten years and most are just thinking about today and tomorrow.  If you don’t see the journey, then there is no drive, no vision, no passion. You have to have the passion and drive in addition to the positive energy, which I talked about in my last posting; you have to have passion and drive. It is important to get people to think long-term and visualize themselves in the future. This is essential for an organization to have people with vision, big dreams, and who can connect themselves to the growth of an organization, community. Caring people with vision, drive and positive leadership will be the builders of the future and the Caring Organization. They are the ones to instill positive and successful culture.

Big dreams may take big changes, and that might include changes in locations—where you live, profession—a new career, making new friends, etc. You can have it “all” but you must define what “all” is and then make decisions about how to get it. “Dream Big and Make It Happen” is my motto.

I quickly realized years ago that what I wanted and I called it “all”. I realized that I could realize my dream in new environment, outside of Armenia, where I was born and grew up, so I thought I have to make a change. You have to have the dare, the passion, the drive to make the necessary changes to attain your dream. It was a big dream for me to start my new life and I took that step. I moved. New York City became my new environment. How did I come to that conclusion?

My teen years were fundamental for me. I built a person within me. I was really trying to understand life and what my purpose and Big Dream was. It was important for my awareness for me to analyze and to know: where am I going? What do I want? I did research. I was reading a lot. The library was my second home. I was choosing books that taught me what I needed to learn. My two initial targets were politics and classic literature because I wanted a big vocabulary. I wanted to understand different times, different environments and characters and learn about their experiences. Then I read science fiction and philosophy followed by reading about law and economics. I loved physics and chemistry. I studied astrology and how the world was created. I studied music.

I knew one thing very clearly. I wanted to have options about things, not just react and follow. I knew I had to get a good education. I knew I had to learn other languages and cultures. I became fluent in Russian and English in addition to Armenian, my native language. We are all on one small planet and I wanted to know this planet. I wanted to know about the world, so I studied history and geography. I joined arts clubs.  I was listening to all this great music coming from the other side of the world, all this literature—Dickens, Flaubert, Camus, Bzhezhinski. I was very interested in the different kinds of concepts coming from all over. I tried to understand the value of things. What do I value? Is it core of family and relationships? Or is it skills and technical knowledge?

All these books and literature, classic and non-classic, and music, science, different languages, all of these I just put things together and connected some dots. When I was out of college and had my Masters in Economics and Masters in Political Economy I defined my Big Dream in two parts. Part 1: Become someone in the corporate world, Part 2: Define and drive happiness and help build a greater future for the planet.

I consciously decided to come to explore the world and dare to be out of my comfort zone: I left my country and tried to become someone on another part of the planet—New York. I did visualize the freedom of driving my dreams to their fulfillment and also the freedom of making mistakes. There were almost no boundaries that I could see at the time to prevent me from reaching my dream. Here I am, now 20 years later, with the first part of my dream fulfilled—having a career journey in the corporate world. I am now working on Part 2. The Caring Organization is a big part of that change and future.

My million-dollar question to you, my reader, is “What is your Big Dream? Are you joining me in my Big Dream, Part 2?  Define and drive happiness and build a great, better future for our planet.”