Seriously, Forget All Of Your Big Dreams This Year, Here’s Why
We know very well that our resolutions this year are BS.
It’s 2021! Instead of you and your friends singing Auld Lang Syne, this year you open Spotify and play that song. If 2020 sounds a little bit too much and rough for you, then you are not alone, that’s how most people felt about it
Everytime the year has changed we wrote ourselves new resolutions, all the things that we want to achieve and accomplish in this year. But seriously, we do this every year, and looking back from the last year, how many achievements we had accomplished last year?.
Okay, thanks to Covid we have something to blame for what happened to the last year’s resolution
It seems writing our big goals every year is kind of useless. Yes, I feel it too, maybe we are eager to do it within the first couple of weeks and then just stop doing it at all in the following months.
So what actually happened here? Why the pattern always be the same? and what can we do to achieve things this year? These are million-dollar questions.
So unless we are making a difference approach, we might just fall into the same pattern. So instead of focusing on your big dreams, just forget about them and try to apply these things.
Stop thinking about the results
It’s almost midnight, you are lying in your bed with your favorite song playing, just chilling and looking up to the ceiling, imagining you have accomplished your dreams.
Maybe you want to be a successful person, maybe you want to lose weight, maybe you want to be rich or even maybe you want to be the next Hemmingway.
It’s nice to see things with such optimism, but the thing with picturing all the big dreams makes us feel like garbage.
Now ‘garbage’ might be a little too harsh but that’s the truth.
Last year I had a dream of opening my own coffee shop, it would be small, different but cozy and warm, in order to open my own coffee shop I have to save a lot of money and gain knowledge about the coffee business itself.
I started myself as a Barista, doing all the technical things that I couldn’t even imagine doing it before, it was more than just making coffee, I mopped the floor and cleaned the dishes, you going have to start somewhere right? that’s what I tell myself.
Then every lunch break, I’m picturing doing some work in my own coffee shop in the future, do I feel motivated? a little bit, do I feel like a garbage? pretty much.
Most of idealist people said, ‘you never know what might happen in the future’, but I’m tired of approaching things idealistically, I’m more of a realistic person after getting hurt again and again.
Then after lunch, I was enjoying my coffee, it was a free beverage from the store, holding my phone, listening to some music and imagining my big dreams, and all of sudden I’m counting how much many I have to save to open that coffee shop.
I’m counting that it would take me 15 years to open my coffee shop with that amount of salary, and mopping the floors in the middle of the night isn’t quite the knowledge that might be useful to open my own coffee shop.
Now the word ‘garbage’ is more acceptable right?
We read it everywhere, we saw it on the TVs, we know it very well that the key to success is nothing but persistence, even The Founder movie describing the struggle of McDonald’s use the word of persistence.
Because there’s a huge gap between the place we are standing right now and our dreams, and everytime we look into that gap, we’ll feel like garbage.
I know sometimes we give up easily, but it is more likely to give up instantly if we keep focusing on the goals, not the journey.
Being successful, being rich, being a good writer, isn’t something that we can achieve, it’s beyond our control, the only thing that we can do is doing what we can actually control, the small things that we can do everyday.
Break your big dreams into smaller pieces
In 2017, Stephen Duneier made a great speech at TEDx, he mentioned that if you want to achieve great things you have to break them into smaller pieces, into actions that you can do everyday.
He called it making ‘marginal adjustment’.
The video is 18 minutes long, but that’s might be one of the most valuable 18 minutes in your entire life, I’m suggesting you watch the video.
Our big dreams are made from hundreds or even thousands of little things. These little things are the ones that we can do everyday, as simple as turning off the television and start doing our work.
Our goals are not to achieve all of our dreams this year, our goals are to make small progress everyday, instead of just writing “I want to be rich” on your resolution, it would be so much better to write a to-do list for everything that you can do and applicable everyday.
We are responsible for things that still in our control and forget everything that is far beyond our control.
I always wanted to become a great writer, I know very well that to become a great writer I have to write a lot even if its bad writings. That was my last year’s resolution.
Did I write a lot? No.
Because I was too busy picturing myself when I had achieved, then there was a moment where I looked at myself and I had no talent at all to became a writer.
This year I still have the ambition to become a better writer for myself, but instead of putting “Being a good writer” into the list again, I just wrote, “write 3000 words everyday”.
Because ‘being a good writer’ is beyond my reach, but ‘write 3000 words everyday’ is something that I can accomplish, at the end of the day I might not be Hemmingway yet, but that’s not even the problem because I’m not aiming to be him when I have accomplished my 3000 words, that’s good enough for me.
Eventually, here I am, writing an article trying to accomplish my 3000 words, is my article good? No, am I happy? yes, because I know at the end of the day, I have accomplished my writing and I’m getting better everyday.
Fall in love with the process
This line comes from Reggie Rivers from his TEDx Talk speech.
Another great video that I’m recommending you to invest your time watching it.
People said that all of the processes are cruel and so heavy. That’s what people might say if they’re focusing on their dreams instead of on the process.
The process is your dream, its something that you have to love and something that you have to do everyday, everytime you wake up in the morning and in the evening before closing your eyes.
Being a famous musician is a great dream, but taking that guitar from its bag and learning it, notes by notes, then eventually it becomes one song, from one song becomes two songs, and before you even realize it you get to create your own music.
Stop picturing yourself standing in front of the crowd, holding your guitar and the crowd suddenly cheering at you, that’s not your goal. Your goal just to open a youtube and learn one song, that’s good enough.
With this kind of perspective, you will love the process, because it’s what matters the most.
Because you will never climb the mountain by looking at the top, you have to take your first step, taking a thousand step at a time might be impossible, but taking one step at a time and now everyone can do it, repeat it, be persistent.
Now you have unlocked the key of success, and the key of being persistent, try to look into your resolutions this year, if it’s still too big and beyond your reach, you will have to break it into smaller pieces.
But if you have done that already, take your actions and doing it everyday, one day you will be grateful for every small thing that you have done today.
