Claim: Even though young people often receive the advice to “follow your dreams,” more emphasis should be placed on picking worthy goals. Reason: Many people’s dreams are inherently selfish.

The claim states that young people should only be advised to follow their dreams if their goals are worthy of pursuing. Even though I agree with the statement, I disagree with the author's reason behind the claim.

However, to state that many people's dreams are inherently selfish is too broad and an extreme statement. The author provides no support or background for his reason. In a sample of young people's dreams: some are selfish, some are noble, some are trivial, some are important, and some are idealistic. To say that a majority of the goals is selfish is unwarranted.

Nevertheless, young people should not be blindly told to follow their dreams. In a silly example, if a child's dream is to eat as much cotton candy as possible, then it would be unwise to tell the child to follow his dream. The wise and right advice would be to help the child understand why he should not pursue his goal. In a serious example, if a child's dream is to be a dictator, then it would be an atrocity to tell the child to follow his dream since it could bring about war.

On the other hand, we must be careful of our judgement of which goals are worthy. For example, if a child's dream is to cure cancer. Even though the dream might seem hard to achieve and there might be other worthy and tangible goals for the child to pursue, we should not dampen the child's idealistic goals. As a society, we need these quixotic goals to bring about progress technologically, socially and economically. Therefore, the judgement of worthiness itself could be debated. A goal might be deemed worthy by one person while at the same time judged to be useless by another.

In conclusion, people should not blindly give the advice without a basic sanity check of the goals. If the dream is extremely selfish or silly, then the advise should not be given. Otherwise, the child should be advised to follow his dreams.