Once again Leadel held parley to another intellectually stimulating event at the IDC-Herzliya, this past Thursday, April 29, featuring Amsterdam-born lecturer and dreamer Yuri van der Sluis. "Dreamer" here is meant literally, not pejoratively. Yuri is a man of many dreams. He believes all of them can happen if he makes it so. As the aphorism of Theodor Herzl went, If you will it is no fairytale. Indeed, what was true for establishing a modern Jewish state in its ancient homeland is no less true for becoming a world-famous author, an athletic champion or any other thing you want to do with your life. You cannot go it alone, nor should you. A key to this is networking: not in the assumed sense of asking for a handout from people with whom you make an acquaintance but, rather, to ask them, "What are you working on? How can I help you?"

The world today does not have time for patience, dreams and a childlike sense of discovery. It wants productivity, structure, curriculum vitae. Yuri summarily threw out all of that shtuyot.

Many people seem to believe that once they get the right accredited letters from the best institutions money can buy they have to find a career and ride that way of life until their retirement. Yuri thinks this need not be so. "I am here for a lot of things," he said, clutching a book on patience (savlanut in Hebrew). What is patience, if not a reliance on the inner wisdom and strength we all have to make what we want into reality. It all begins with a list. The world today does not have time for patience, dreams and a childlike sense of discovery. It wants productivity, structure, curriculum vitae. Yuri summarily threw out all of that shtuyot (nonsense). We don't need that because it can become dead weight, which for me makes sense. Too much experience can lock someone down into a hyper-specialized field from which they are not able to escape if — God forbid — they want to do something else before they leave the world.

Yet his talk left unaddressed the value of experience, the assets people can bring to the world and to each other with insights that are not common knowledge to us all. Make a list and make it concrete, but not "goal-oriented," Yuri declared with youthful panache. It is a mature lesson for how to take that big, airy fantasy of being, say, an international superstar reporter into something actually tangible: break it down into steps and take it piece by piece. At the risk of cliche, and with his exhortations that line drew perilously close, if something is interesting to you then there is value in pursuing it — no matter what. At least from the perspective of the audience, money did not appear to be an object for this kind of self-help life coaching, regardless of the real importance of his advice.

The discussion that ensued, including some pointed questions, begged the question of which is better: the journey or the destination? Lao Tzu taught that the journey of a thousand miles — ahem, kilometers — begins with a single step. At some point, in order to get anywhere, you have to pull the trigger, even if it moves you forward a small space away from where you were before.