Dreaming big is usually done after getting a moment of inspiration from a hard-to-believe type of story that you hear, but this type of inspiration is lost after a few hours, or after a few days in the best case. You might find yourself in the same position as you were before having that type of dream, and you might start to think that you are not meant to achieve that dream. That is because you did not take any action to turn it into a reality. You did not commit to achieve it.
One of the reasons why you have not achieved it is because you found it hard to start acting at it, because it seemed such a big goal that overwhelmed you. You did not know where to start and usually started doing something else that would be reasonable to mention as a task that you were busy with, instead of working towards your goal.
If you are serious about achieving that goal, turn that ambiguous objective into smaller objectives that are clear and that are measurable, so that when you achieve them, you can tick them off the list and become aware of the progress that you are going through. Having smaller goals can inspire you to take action, because a smaller goal can be seen more realistic and the unknown path to the big goal that you have can become more vivid.
Let me turn my article into a more concrete so that it becomes clearer to you the point that I am trying to mention.
- If you are assigned to create a new website layout and have been hiding behind the curtain and not started yet, deconstruct it and set smaller goals like adding a menu bar, or adding a commenting form. After you are done with them, start to focus on other tasks that will help you get much closer to the whole layout.
- If you have to study for a subject but have been putting it off for a lot of days in a row, turn your study sessions into objective-oriented ones so that you can measure your progress easier. Instead of writing “Study maths” in your to-do list, write, I will learn the “Euler Theorem”, or instead of “Publish a scientific paper”, write smaller subtasks such as “Spend an hour a day reading previous research articles that were published”. After you have seen yourself sticking to this process of reading an hour a day, you might get new insights that would probably lead you a step closer to your publication.
If you think that you are not going to achieve your goal by turning it smaller goals, ask yourself, “How do you eat an elephant?” Your answer should be “One bite at a time” and it should serve as a reminder.
