7//3 charles goodman

A professor told her class of college seniors that she’d divided her final exam into three
categories from which students were to choose only one.

The first category of questions was the mostdifficult and worth 50 points. The second was somewhat easier, worth 40 points. The third group, the easiest, was worth 30 points.

When grading, she gave A’s to the students who chose the hardest category. Students who chose category two were given B’s, and those settling for the easiest were given C’s. Naturally, some of the students were frustrated with the grading. The professor said: “I wasn’t testing your knowledge. I was  testing your aim.”

It’s important to aim high — to have dreams that inspire you to go beyond your limits. Someone who doesn’t dream about the future is someone who doesn’t know where he or she is going.

Harvard psychologist David McClelland has studied high achievers extensively and has concluded that successful people fantasize and dream incessantly about how to achieve their goals.

“Dreams, not desperation, move organizations to the highest levels of performance,” wrote Robert Waterman Jr. in his book “The Renewal Factor.” “Our dream ought to be institutions that work for, not against, our needs. That is the hope, the power, the dream and the challenge in renewal.”

The late Erma Bombeck, author and columnist, said: “A devotion to excellence, detail and quality can create a legend to make dreams come true. There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say, ‘Yes, I’ve got dreams, of course, I’ve got dreams.’

“Then they put the box away and bring it out once in a while to look at it, and yep, they’re still there. These are great dreams, but they never even get out of the box. It takes an uncommon amount of guts to put your dreams on the line, to hold them up and say, ‘How good or how bad am I?’ That’s where courage comes in.”

Bombeck fulfilled her dreams. As a housewife, her dream was to write about raising three children in Dayton, Ohio. Her problem was convincing the men who ran the Dayton Journal Herald that what she had to say might interest their readers. She learned where the paper’s editors lived — a suburb with a small weekly paper. So she took a job writing a column for it. Soon, the Journal Herald editors’ wives became big fans and persuaded their husbands to run her column. Within two years, she was in syndication across the country.

I often joke that it takes years to become an overnight success. But it starts with a dream. My dream was to own a factory. I wasn’t sure what I’d make or where. But I pictured myself walking the factory floor, talking to workers. The pile of broken-down machines I bought might have looked more like a nightmare at the time. But dreams come true — with a lot of wide-awake work.

“If you can imagine it, you can achieve it.”