Samuel Pepys wanted to bring order to his seventeenth century world. He dreamed of introducing orderly systems to the navy. The plague, London burning down, the Dutch destroying the British fleet all kept him from achieving his dream. So did corruption and the women he couldn't resist, including his wife.
William Bligh dreamed of outdoing his mentor, Captain James Cook and becoming Britain's greatest explorer. Bligh played a role in the events that led up to Cook's death on Hawaii. Afterwards he gathered breadfruit saplings on Tahiti and faced the mutiny on the Bounty. In a tiny boat, he then sailed 3500 miles to safety. It didn't matter. His reputation was ruined.
Paul Gauguin, after his disastrous encounter with Vincent Van Gogh, went to Tahiti. Gauguin called himself a "savage", by which he meant someone not encumbered by the restrictions of contemporary European society. As a savage painter, he dreamed of revolutionizing the artistic world. Largely using the Tahitian women he encountered, Gauguin tried to achieve his aim. When he took his Tahitian pictures back to Paris to sell in the 1890s, no one would buy them.
All these men, Pepys, Bligh and Gauguin, became famous for reasons they never dreamed.