Live the dream

Many people go through life putting off their joy and happiness. To them, goal setting means that " someday, " after they achieve something, only then will they be able to enjoy life to the fullest. The truth is that if we decide to be happy now, we'll automatically achieve more. While goals provide a magnificent direction and a way to focus, we must constantly strive to live each day to its fullest, squeezing all the joy we can out of each moment. Instead of measuring your success and failure in life by your ability to achieve an individualized and specific goal, remember that the direction we're heading is more important than individual results. If we continue to head in the right direction, we may not only achieve the goals we're pursuing but a lot more!

One man whose life I believe represents the power of a compelling future to change one's abilities, and whose life also reminds us that not achieving our intended goal may actually cause us to achieve a greater one, is the late Michael Landon. Why was this man beloved by so many?

He represented many of the highest values within our culture: a strong sense of family, doing the right thing, consistency and integrity, and persistence in the face of adversity, along with a sense of deep caring and love.

This man who brightened so many lives became a cultural hero through a rather indirect route. He grew up in a physically and emotionally abusive environment where his parents fought constantly, his father being Jewish (and hating Catholics) and his mother being a Catholic (who was also anti-Semitic). His mother frequently staged melodramatic suicide attempts and often pursued Michael to the local teen hangout, where she'd jump out of a taxi to beat him with a coat hanger.

A chronic bed wetter by the time he reached high school, Michael was afflicted with uncontrollable facial tics and was making involuntary gulping[85] sounds. He was skinny and filled with fear. This doesn't sound very much like the confident, self-assured patriarch of the Ingalls family he portrayed on TV's Little House on the Prairie, does it? What changed his life?

One day, in his sophomore[86] year in high school, the gym teacher took the class out onto the football field to take a shot at throwing an old, rusty javelin. Michael was about to have an experience that would reshape his view of himself forever. When his turn came, he approached the javelin with the same fear and lack of confidence with which he had approached everything else in his life up until then.

But that day a miracle happened. Michael hurled that javelin[87] forward, and it flew out of the track area thirty feet farther than anyone else had ever thrown it. In that moment, Michael knew he had a future. As he was to say later in an interview with Life magazine, " On that day, I had found something I could do better than other people, something I could grab on to. And I grabbed. I begged the coach to let me take that javelin home for the summer, and he let me. And I threw it and threw it and threw it."

Michael had found his compelling future, and he pursued it with a ferocious[88] intensity. The results were absolutely amazing. By the time he returned from summer vacation, his body had begun to transform. In his sophomore year he began doing exercises to build his upper body. And by his senior year, he had broken the U.S. record for high school students in the javelin throw, winning an athletic scholarship[89] to the University of Southern California. To put it in his words, the " mouse" had " become a lion." How's that for a metaphor?

The story doesn't end here. Part of Michael's strength emanated from[90] a belief he developed by watching a movie about Samson and Delilah. He believed that if he grew his hair long, he'd become strong. Indeed, it worked while he was in high school. Unfortunately, his belief was in for a rude awakening when he arrived at USC in the crew-cut era of the fifties. A group of short-haired athletes slammed him to the ground and cut off his long, leonine locks. Even though intellectually he knew better, his strength immediately disappeared. In fact, his javelin throw dropped by more than 30 feet. As he pushed himself to match his past performances, he injured himself so badly that he was out for the year, and the athletic department made it so difficult for him he was compelled to leave. In order to support himself, he had to unload freight in a manufacturing plant. It looked as though his dream had died. How would he ever meet his vision of being an international track star?

Fortunately, one day he was spotted by a Hollywood talent agent who asked him to try out for the part of Little Joe Cartwright in what would be the first color western on television. Bonanza. After that, there was no looking back. Michael's career as an actor, and eventually a director and producer, was launched. Missing his dream had given him his future. But the pursuit of his original goals, and the direction they took him, sculpted both his physical body and his character, two of the elements of growth that were necessary to prepare him for his ultimate future. Sometimes we need to trust that our disappointments may truly be opportunities in disguise[91].