Dreaming Bigger than You Can See
Paradise in a Cornfield
“Dream no small dreams, for they have no power to move the hearts of men.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Dreaming Bigger than You Can See
What’s Your Juice? had an incredible first week and reached #1 New Release status in a number of Amazon’s categories—thanks for all the support! This story is one of my favorites from the book.
What would you build if recognition didn’t matter? If you had no guarantee anyone would care … but you did. What would you create?
As a kid, I chased something pretty simple—I just wanted to have fun playing ball.
Growing up in a rural area, I was far from big stadiums or the craziness of today’s youth sports. Our house sat near a lake, surrounded by acres of farmland and forest. It was a mystical place where water, farmland, and forest converged, leveling out as a grassy area at the base of a hill. It wasn’t the kind of place where you could field a full baseball team, but it was the kind of place where imagination and energy had room to run wild.
So we built a Wiffleball field.
At first, it was just an idea—a place to hit balls around with my brothers and friends. But it grew. We started to spruce it up, digging holes for old telephone poles to make fence posts, stretching chain link, painting foul lines, and learning how to mow grass with striped precision, just like the big-league parks we saw on TV.
We dug a pond and installed a working fountain behind center field, hooked up a PA system, wired up floodlights, and even hung tires from the outfield fence. If you hit a ball through one, you’d win a prize. Amazingly, it never happened, so I am not quite sure what that prize would have been. We added a clock tower with a real, working clock. We eventually built a mini-grandstand from salvaged movie theater seats. We called it Hovey Field, named after the eccentric previous owner of the property. We even named a pet pygmy goat and field mascot “Harris” for him. The clock tower read, “It’s Always Hovey Time!”
If this sounds excessive for a backyard Wiffleball field, it was—and that’s exactly what made it so magical. We lost track of time out there. Friends came from all over to play. Parents trusted it as a safe haven. At dusk, when mosquitoes the size of birds emerged, we sprayed the grass with a lemon dish soap concoction we swore worked—kind of. When fog would roll in and we’d still play, it just added to the fun.
Not everything worked out perfectly. We learned on the fly. One night, a hot wire from a light pole came in contact with our chain-link fence. The next morning, we found a raccoon that had had a rough night. The fence had become electrified, and, well, let’s say nature lost that round.
Eventually, newspapers ran stories on Hovey Field. TV news crews filmed features. Airplanes flew over to take pictures of the diamond cut into the countryside. It was our own little Field of Dreams. But none of that was why we built it. We built it because we loved the work. We willed it into being.
Hovey Field was a dream forged into reality by a group of teenage kids—it was about belief. It started as a small idea that grew into something remarkable. That’s what big dreams do: they expand far beyond what you can see when you begin.
Dreaming stretches your imagination until it meets your effort. It’s about seeing something that isn’t there yet—and refusing to let life’s obstacles prevent you from building it.
Big dreams:
Stretch your capacity. They force you to grow, learn, and think differently.
Fuel your purpose. They give you energy on the days when it would be easier to quit.
Inspire others. They make people believe that something extraordinary can come from ordinary places.
Shape the future. You may not even finish the dream, but someone else will start where you left off.
As coaches and leaders, our job is to help others dream bigger than they think they can. Every team, every classroom, every community starts with a vision that someone dared to imagine first.
The real magic happens when your dream becomes our dream. That’s what happened at Hovey Field. “If you build it, they will come” really did happen.
So don’t scale your vision down to what feels safe. Build your own Hovey Field. Put in the work. Spray for the mosquitoes. Learn as you go. And if you do it with care, people will find their way to you.
“If you can dream it, you can do it.”
— Walt Disney
Connecting this quote to the story. When you dare to dream something meaningful and pour your effort into it, imagination becomes reality.
This week’s Chasing Influence tip: If something you care about doesn’t exist yet, start building it. Dream big—people will join you when they see your belief.
If you enjoyed this story, a series of three Chasing Influence workbooks is available. Stories are accompanied by discussion questions and answers. Each workbook contains 33 lessons to use with any team.
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