Interview with Jonathan Mead

May 2, 2009 | |
RECLAIM YOUR DREAMS is a wonderful read, inspiring and thoughtful that will change your life.

Jonathan Mead ( follow him on twitter) draws from his life and brings a book that outlines why you should you be in touch with your dreams. He talks here about his inspiration in the book and how everyone can implement them. 

Hi Jonathan, thanks very much for the interview. Your book “reclaim your dreams” is a straight cut invitation to dream- what do you mean by it?
By dreams I mean the idea we have in our minds of the way our lives could be, before we stopped believing. We have a lot of unnecessary shoulds and musts that we place on ourselves that are really optional. We see them as requirements, but they're really agreements. To reclaim your dreams, you simply need to stop agreeing with a view of life that isn't what you want to create.

You talk about taking risk, taking the plunge- how applicable do you think it is in today’s economy? 
I think it's more applicable than ever. The downturn in the economy is just showing us that mediocrity cannot be tolerated. The downturn is basically distilling the market down to a level of excellence. Only the truly excellent, truly passionate and driven individuals will survive.

Now is a better time than ever to devote yourself to doing something you're really passionate about. When you focus that passion into something that fills a need or a gap in the market, that's when you create truly remarkable interactions. And remarkable, amazing value is what is always going to be safe, no matter how great the downturn.

Personally what keeps you going? I mean you talk about out of the template style living, how did it work for you? 
What keeps me going to is my drive to create a social revolution of people liberating themselves, through living on their own terms. It's so ridiculously exciting to me to do this stuff, sometimes its hard to contain.

As for the template life, it didn't really work. My cog has been malfunctioning for quite some time. I think it's now broken beyond repair.

Times are hard and sometimes it’s not so easy to take the risk, to do things out of the norm even when the person really wants it. What do you suggest- what should they do? Are they doing wrong by taking the much traveled path?

Taking risks is a big deal, especially when you have a family or people depending on you. In that case, don't kill your dreams. What you'll have to do is carve out some time every day that you'll use to work on your dreams. In the beginning in might be 20 minutes, then after a while you find a way to turn it into an hour. You have to ruthlessly remove all of the things from your schedule that aren't adding value, to make time to work on your dreams.

Then once you're making a decent amount of income doing it, your "dream time" starts to snowball. That's when you can really use the momentum to cut back on your day job hours and keep the snowball going.

I personally believe in what you are suggesting like “inspirational desktop” or “poster board” to keep quotation or pictures that inspire me. In fact, my purse has 3 quotations in them- do you think visualizing is in a big way an aid to get closer to your dreams?
I think it is a big aid. It's something to keep you inspired and reminded about why you're doing what you're doing. It helps you keep plugging away when it seems like the culmination of your dreams is far off in the distance. And it doesn't have to be visual. It could be an audio recording, or a "dream movie" with your favorite music. It sounds kind of cheesy, but I've found this incredibly powerful.


I’m big fan of your writings and this book is fascinating and a must read I think for everyone, so where can the readers get a copy for themselves?
They can head on over to my blog or go straight here to the book description page

Jonathan Mead is a revolutionary, raw foodist, dream coach, and prolific blogger. He is interested in unconventional paths to personal growth and advocates strange things like killing your goals. In his spare time he studies Jeet Kune Do and other ass-kicking strategies. His mission is to create a social revolution of people liberating themselves through living on their own terms.

1 comments:

My Wish said...

..."Stand up for what you believe in-even if it means standing alone."

~DREAM BIG~