Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.
Langston Hughes
My inspiration since high school
The quote that has stayed with me
The story behind the name
Some things find you exactly when you need them. For me, it was a poster.
I was browsing the poster section of the Harvard Coop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when one caught my attention. It carried Langston Hughes's reminder to hold fast to dreams, and I knew I had to buy it. The picture wasn't the broken-winged bird from his lines. It was the opposite: birds soaring, climbing the sky without any trouble at all. Maybe that's what grabbed me. The dream not deferred, but in full flight. That day I hung it on my bedroom wall, where it stayed all through high school. The words stuck. I even worked them into my yearbook caption.
Hughes's warning has stayed with me ever since. What happens to a dream deferred, left to wither or fester, has never felt abstract to me. Instead, it feels a personal mantra and a life-long responsibility.
So when I started this coaching practice, I chose HOLDFAST. It's Hughes's charge to protect the dream, and it's exactly what I try to do for the fundraisers and advancement leaders I work with: help them hold fast to theirs, especially when work and life challenges can makes that hard.
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David Woodruff
