If your dream only works when everyone claps, it’s not a dream. It’s an audition.

A plan that depends on approval puts other people in charge of whether you carry on. The thing you say you want has quietly become a bid for a reaction, and the moment the reaction is missing the whole project stops making sense to you. A real aim survives an indifferent audience. That is the test: whether you would keep going with nobody watching and nobody impressed.

Ask whether you would still want this if it stayed private for two years. If the honest answer is no, you may be after the applause rather than the work, and knowing that changes what to do next.