Must Read Of The Week: Dream And Achieve by Kola Olutimehin

Dream and Achieve: Discover and Express Your Passion in Your Lifetime by ‘Dream Driver’ Kola Olutimehin is the perfect read to kick off 2022 with a bang, offering an instructional and motivational guide to reaching your true destiny.  

By Gwyneth Rees 

We all come into this world with dreams and ambitions that we would dearly like to achieve, to bring satisfaction and validation to our lives.  

Yet, despite this, it seems that for the majority those sought-after goals remain just that, never transitioning from the mind to reality.  

However, it doesn’t have to be this way, as inspirational self-help guide Dream and Achieve: Discover and Express Your Passion in Your Lifetime is here to remind us.  

Written by coach, public speaker and “Dream Driver” Kola Olutimehin, this book is the perfect read to kick off 2022, motivating readers to doggedly pursue their desires and discover their purpose in life.  

And, in short, those dreams could be anything, for the same guidance and structure that Kola sets out so clearly in Dream and Achieve can be applied equally whatever your age, background or ambition. Whether you are an aspiring entrepreneur, a seasoned professional, student or housewife, you will find that the same mental framework is the essential element that turns aspirations into actualities.  

In fact, the only prerequisite is to have a dream in the first place, or the enthusiasm to discover one. This is a central point for the author, who observes that having a dream brings meaning to life. At the start of the book, in the section titled ‘Any Dream Will Do’, he states: 

I believe that everyone ought to have a dream, together with the intentions and plans to take relevant action steps towards the attainment of that dream. A dream elongates your life and gives you mastery over death, because death, which is a wicked angelic being, recognises and respects the practical dreamer! 

When you lose your dreams, you risk death, not only physically but mentally as well! In my study of great achievers, I have discovered that when some of them gave up hoping after the attainment of their dreams, they soon died. They no longer had a dream to look forward to and live for. 

However, as the above passages indicate, having a dream is nice but useless unless you also have a robust plan already in place to attain it.  

In addition, you will also need to develop resilience because, as Kola makes clear—speaking as much from his own experience as wider insights—any journey to success is going to be paved with obstacles along the way.  

You must be ready to tackle issues head on, learn from them, and be mentally equipped to dig deep in pursuit of your destination, banishing any hint of a quitter’s mentality. In other words, and as more eloquently put by the great inventor Henry Ford—one of the author’s personal heroes—“Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently”. 

This, to me, is a key appeal of Dream and Achieve. It praises and encourages the daring to achieve your goals but at no point sugarcoats things. You must seek your dreams with your eyes open.  

This key message is reinforced throughout the book. Don’t abandon your dreams but, instead, have the courage to turn them into reality, being ready to get right up again when challenges knock you down.  

The book is divided into seven easy-to-digest chapters that take the reader from finding and defining their dream to putting together the winning formula that will see them come true.  

Powering this whole process is Kola’s unique and supremely practical set of guiding principles:  the Empowered Thought Pillars (ETPs). 

Introduced in the second chapter, ‘A Winning Formula That Never Fails’, the ETPs consist of four key ethical pillars of thought that must be considered by every “practical dreamer”.  

These comprise ‘giving back’ (to your community), ‘having a heart of kindness’ (towards those less fortunate), ‘using fair conduct’ (only becoming involved in projects that benefit everyone within that project), and providing a ‘beneficial service’ (where the customer benefits).  

Addressing each of these pillars, the author advises, will help transform your thought processes and empower your actions, helping focus the individual on lifting up others as they pursue their own goal.  

At the same time, the practical dreamer must be wary of negative habits that could easily derail their plans, including greed, fear, and a lack of commitment to continued education.  

Throughout the book, Kola highlights the common problems we face on the way to reaching our dreams, so we can avoid or conquer them as soon as they emerge.  

He discusses, for instance, how dreams—which are not just fantasies, but the “seedlings of reality”—are so often wrongly knocked out of children by their well-meaning parents, and require intervention later on in life to resurrect them.  

He warns, too, of the things that can stunt our vision for success attainment, such as fatigue, short-term thinking, narrow-mindedness, and fear of ridicule.  

What comes out most here is that it is often the case that the biggest hurdle to realising our dreams is us, with doubts such as the feeling of being too old, too behind others, or being too short on time dragging us down into inaction and defeat.  

In answer to this, Kola shares a motto by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato:  “The first and best victory is to conquer self; to be conquered by self is, of all things, shameful and vile.” 

You’ll find a treasure trove of inspiring quotes peppered throughout Dream and Achieve, selected by Kola for their essential truth and value.  

Some of my favourites include “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried something new” (Albert Einstein), and Anthony Robbins’ pearl of wisdom, “Procrastination is the assassination of motivation and goals real