When Richard Branson was running Student a magazine he started at school, before dropping out, he was approached by Patricia Lambert of IPC the giant British magazine publisher.

IPC offered Branson £80,000 and also offered him a well paid job. After a meeting with the Board of Directors a deal was agreed in principle, hands shaking and then everyone went to lunch.
 
Branson, just 16 at this stage, shared with these “titans of business” his vision for Student. It included Student Holidays, Student Travel Agency, Student record shops, Student health clubs and maybe, even a Student airline. Eyebrows were raised and mutterings heard.

After lunch, late that same day, Patricia Lambert phoned Branson and told him that the directors had reconsidered their decision and were now not going to proceed with the deal.

Branson reflects in his new book "Business Stripped Bare" that they were probably too polite to says so, but they probably though this 16 year old kid was mad.
 
I have written before about dreams, goals, to do lists and inner thoughts of what is possible. Robert Kiyosaki of Rich Dad, Poor Dad talks about being inspired by a network marketer who had donated $1 million to his local city council to fund a library, so he that in return, he could have a street named after his father.

Kiyosaki's comment was that “it wasn’t the 7 car garage that impressed him, or the 7 classic cars in the garage, or magnificent home with 7 bedrooms, a ballroom or a Olympic size pool beside the tennis courts… it was that following the donation of $1 million to the city, the network marketer was living in a street named after his father.”

Kiyosaki said that he learnt that day that his dreams were not BIG ENOUGH..
 
Fast forward from 1966 when Richard Branson was dreaming aloud to those stuffed shirts from IPC to 2006 when Branson was recording his achievements from 2005 in his Daily Journal…

Richard Branson’s Achievement List from “Business Stripped Bare”
 
1.    6 new 747 400’s
2.    10 new A340 600’s
3.    Ordered 5 new A380XX’s – biggest plane in world
4.    Opened games reserves in Africa recognised as amongst the very best
5.    Bought 5 miles Majorcan coastline for new hotel
6.    Kasbah in hills of Marrakech
7.    launched low cost airline in Australia – Virgin Blue – that caused Qantas shares to
       drop 25% and air fares even more
8.    sold 5,000 cars through www.virgincars.com – fastest growing online car company 1
9.    signing up 15,000 new customers a week to gas/electricity
10.  sold a million mobile phones
11.  secured site for largest cinema in the world in Tokyo
12.  launched Virgin Mobile in Australia 100,000 sold in first 3 months
13.  opened first Megastore in Beirut Dubai in September
14.  sold 20,000 mortgages
15.  Trainline – sold 10 million tickets through 4 million customers
16.  set up Virgin Travelstore
17.  set up virginwines.com – most successful wine website
18.  secured permission to fly Toronto to Lagos
19.  bought or built 100 Virgin Active Centres both in Britain and South Africa with average
      size of 40,000 sq feet
20.  launched complete new interiors and exteriors for all Virgin Atlantic fleet and
       introduced new seats
21.  won bid with other airlines to run Air Traffic Control
22.  put in best plans for East Coast Mainline same country 4 billion high speed line trains
       up East Coast
23.  introduced new Voyager Travel on Cross Country network on time – one every 5 days

What would dreams this big set you back?? I researched on Google the investment required for just items 1 to 3 of this list:

Cost of a new 747 airplane   US$260 m       for 6 just US$1.6B
Cost of a new A340 600       US $218 m      for 10 just US $2.3B
Cost of a new A380XX          US$320m        for 5 just US $1.6B
 
Total investment for just items 1 to 3 is a staggering $5.5 Billion….
 
Apparently Patricia Lambert wrote to Richard Branson many years later saying that Directors had been kicking themselves over the years as they watched Virgin stir up sector after sector, almost exactly has their “would-be magazine editor" had predicted.
 
My question is simply this: “Now is the time to dust off your dream, make it bolder, and believe that everything is possible… are you Dreaming a dream worthy of striving for!”