I’ve always wondered why God gives people dreams if He is only going to take those dreams away. What’s the point? Why make us go through the trouble of pursuing them? What is it that He wants me to learn by giving me a crazy teenage dream? Well, being a car designer and being a rapper. These were my crazy teenage dreams.
My Crazy Teenage Dreams
As ridiculous as they might seem to you, these two things were at some point the dearest thing to me. Attached to each of the two dreams listed above there was romance, allure and fantasy. I remember how each of these desires was born, and I remember how each of them became a pursuit. And I remember how, eventually, I had to let each of my crazy teenage dreams go.
An Affinity for Cars
As long as I can remember I have had an affinity for cars. When I came home from school as a child in Mexico I would play with HotWheels. The Christmas when I got a HotWheels track made me a very happy child. When we moved to the United States I discovered even more cars. And not just any cars, oh, no. I discovered exotic cars (the italics are for Italian).
I soon started reading every car magazine I could to be as close to that world as possible. One Thursday evening in the spring of 2005 while watching the Discovery Channel I learned that there was a profession known as car designer. I was 12 years old, and right then and there I started to dream. I knew that day that this was going to be my pursuit. From that day on I started sketching cars.
On the Road to Being a Car Designer
I began learning and practicing as much as I could. Automobile Magazine released a yearly “The Design Issue”, and I paid $5 for the first one, I ever held. Their magazines soon started being delivered to my house. I learned everything I could from design trends, to proportions, to the language and vocabulary. Any magazine I could get my hands on I absorbed. From the popular ones to the obscure ones like duPont Registry. I watched the Speed Channel and Pimp My Ride on TV. And, of course, I had the mandatory Fast and Furious movies on VHS. I studied this field and I looked for ways that would help me become better.
I was driven and obsessed. For 8 years I told everyone that this is what I wanted to become. When I say that becoming a car designer was my dream, I mean it. I learned to speak English a whole year faster than my ESOL classmates, just because I wanted to understand what the magazines were saying. I talked to designers in Europe, and I even scheduled a trip to Austria to meet one of them. It was my crazy teenage dream.
This was my lame, but effective design set up in 2013.
Saying Good Bye to Car Design
But my crazy teenage dream slowly started to die when I got to college. I wanted to work for BMW. Unfortunately, the art program at my university did not offer product design as a major. I studied graphic design because it was the closest thing to what I wanted to do that my school offered, but it was a far cry from product design.
I didn’t dedicate enough time on my own to learning product design because I worked full time through college. There was also a lack of exposure to the trade. The nearest design hub to Arkansas was in Chicago, and I simply couldn’t afford it. After five and a half years in university I knew that my work was not good enough to get hired. If I wanted to continue to pursue car design I would have to enroll in an art school focused on product design and do it all over again. This was a tough decision. Car design had been my pursuit for 11 years, but the actual cost of going to art school was too much. So, I had to say goodbye.
Dreaming of Becoming a Rapper
When I moved to the States from Mexico I discovered rap music. I grew up in a rather conservative family. There were few movies that we were allowed to watch, as well as not much music variation. In the United States, though, I was exposed to the magic of music.
There is so much music, but in 2005 rap music was everywhere! I somehow acquired a tiny portable radio that I used to tune in to our local “Hot Mix” radio. I bopped to beats like Tim McGraw and Nelly’s Over & Over. My cousin would play his reggaeton CD’s when we were in his car, and I would watch BET and MTV music videos after school almost every night.
The tipping point happened with the music video of a song called Diamondz on my Neck by Smitty (please, don’t look it up). The song occupies only a miniscule fraction of my memory, but I remember vividly the part of the video where the rapper is driving a metallic red Lamborghini Murcielago down a Miami street with the scissor doors open. I was hooked. I thought, if I can’t get close to cars through car design, I will do it through rap music. And so the plan B of my crazy teenage dreams was born.
Putting in the Work
I was obsessed. I bought CDs and I got a CD player to listen to the music as much as I could. My clothes were like the rappers I watched on TV every day after school. I told people I was a rapper, and I started to write raps.
I remember very well a short clip on MTV. A group of men standing outside an apartment building. One of them held out a notebook and said “You want to be a rapper? This is how much you gotta write.” He flipped the notebook and every page was full of writing. So I followed the example.
At first I would copy the lyrics of other rappers. I learned quickly that this is frowned upon in the rap world, so I started doing my own lyrics. I started rapping everywhere I could. First at church camp. Then at church. Then at pep-rallies at school, and I was even the opener for other bands at their concerts. It seemed like it was meant to be! I mean, I wrote my first song when I was 7. When I performed people got INTO it. Why would it fail?
Wrapping Up My Rapping Career
Well, it turns out that in order to make a living with music one has to be able to record and sell the music. Somehow recording never worked out for me. No matter how much I tried, no matter who I talked to or whom I asked for help, I never could get a team together to make a recording. Even when I had a recording studio, even when I had the money to pay for studio time and to pay for a producer, and even hire singers, it never worked.
As a last attempt I bought a quality microphone that could hook to my laptop and record over tracks that I bought online. Even then, though, it never worked. The sound wasn’t right. The last straw was the time that I moved to Europe for work. I figured that in my downtime I would record. I took my microphone with me, but within the first week of getting there my microphone broke. That was the last attempt I made at recording anything.
Why Should You Care About These Stories?
Well, it’s always tempting to get mad at God for taking away our dreams. Especially when we were holding on to something that was good. It’s easy to think “C’mon! I put so much effort into this!” We get so attached to these things. I found out that saying goodbye to each of my dreams was painful because of the expectation I had formed. So much time and effort had gone into them, so I hoped they would return something.
To my surprise, though, letting go of my dreams opened the door to new pursuits.
It might be the same for you. You might think, “How can I give up on my life goal, or my life dream?” You might consider all the effort you have put into your goal and deem it too much to just let go. But, what if in letting go of it, you are given the chance at something else?
Something Better to Dream Of
Saying good bye to my dream of car design led me to seek work as a salesman at an outdoors store. While working there I discovered that I love people, and I discovered that I want to help people. My experiences there combined with the German I learned in college led me to work at Hilti in Liechtenstein. While working abroad I had to say goodbye to rap. Saying goodbye to rap opened the world of writing, and writing is what led me to start this blog.
Every one of my old pursuits has been replaced by a different pursuit. I believe each of these discoveries is making me a better man, and I believe that the completion of my new pursuits will be much more helpful in achieving my ultimate goal of helping others. I’ve learned that the motives for my old dreams were good, but along with the new pursuits I have I also have more clarity about what I truly care about.
There are some things that we have to say goodbye to that we will never see again. But some goodbyes do make way for new hellos, and in those instances we can take advantage of them.
