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Conversations in Management

Lyndon Johnson

Learn from your dreams what you lack.

There was a lot to dream about and it didn’t take a powerful imagination to figure out what you lacked if you were a kid growing up in the Texas Hill Country during the first half of the twentieth century. One of those things you dreamt about and noticed you didn’t have was electricity. It’s hard to imagine just how hardscrabble and isolated rural life was in the days before electrification. As late as 1937, when Johnson was first elected to Congress, 90 percent of all rural Americans—over 27 million people—lived without electricity. That meant they went without some of the obvious conveniences of depression-era life such as movies and radio. While rural folks read the transcripts, they never actually heard the inspirational cadences of Roosevelt’s fireside chats. They saw refrigerators and washing machines advertised in popular magazines and in the Sears catalog, but had no first-hand experience of these amazing devices. More importantly, though, the lack of electricity made a hard life exponentially harder. The Department of Agriculture estimated at the time that an average farm family used 200 gallons of water a day. That comes to seventy-three thousand gallons a year. In the Hill Country, where most wells were at least 75 feet deep, it came up a bucket at a time. By age forty, most women were permanently stooped from annually carrying what amounted to 300 tons of weight. These were hard days of sad irons, lye-scrubbed clothes and the soft light of kerosene lamps that strained readers’ eyes after dark.

Johnson was only 28 years-old when he went to Washington and set about turning the dream of electricity into a reality. It was a tall order for a rookie congressman with no particular clout. Johnson, however, didn’t see it as an obstacle and tenaciously set about making this dream come true. The story of how he convinced Roosevelt to complete the necessary Colorado River hydro-electric dam and then motivated the Rural Electrification Administration to string wire to isolated farm houses is inspirational and reflects Johnson at his political best. By the time he was elected to the Senate in 1948, virtually his entire congressional district was electrified and he was revered as the man who, “brought the lights.” He also brought the realization that visions, hopes, and aspirations can be made tangible. He demonstrated the practical aspect of dreaming.

Romantics may decry the notion of turning dreams to practical ends, but there's something to be said for the practice. After all, dreams are an imaginative and generally pleasant way of identifying goals for ourselves. They’re often over the top and include the kind of personal stretch that we might not otherwise consider prudent for something more serious than dreaming. But we make a mistake when we dismiss our dreams as frivolous or insignificant. Granted, dreamers don’t enjoy a high degree of status in our pragmatic world, but the truth is that every dream contains some element of great value. Our dreams reveal what we really believe is important and they point to where we’d like to be. If we use them as a map, they can lead us to the kinds of actions that might just make our dreams come true. Spend some time thinking about your dreams. (If the best you can conjure is a vision of winning the lottery this might not work for you.) What do they reveal about your values and priorities? What do you need to bring your dream closer? Encapsulated in every dream is a goal and a plan. Use your dreams well. Dream big and live life large!

—Ebert