We all imagine what our lives would be like if we were wealthier, more independent, or had more free time. But very few people achieve their dreams. Why is that? Frankly, because most of us never consider what it would take to get there.
It’s one thing to dream of lying on a beach in Tahiti, Jamaica, or any other exotic place. It’s another to lay awake at night thinking about all the people you need to call tomorrow, or houses you need to buy or all the errands you need to run in order to make that dream happen.
Achieving your dreams involves getting focused and taking consistent and concrete, realistic steps toward a specific destination. That’s a hard process for a lot of people. But here are a few helpful tips to point you in the right direction:
- Write down your goals
It’s fine to say you want to be a millionaire one day, but it takes time and effort to sit down and figure out what it would take for you to get to that result. You might need to work more hours, sacrifice watching your favorite television show, or even take out a second mortgage.
Dreaming is certainly easier than those possibilities. But remember this, dreaming will always just be dreaming until you take action. Set your goals today, confront the work now, and the dreams will begin to become realities tomorrow.
- Confront your fear of failure
So you’d like to fire your boss? Well, who wouldn’t? And if you haven’t done it yet, at least people still laugh when you say that’s what you’d like to do. But what if you were to say, today, I’m going to find three properties that are available for sale, contact the owners, and schedule appointments with them? People may ask you, did you do it? And if you didn’t, then you look like a failure.
It’s possible, even likely, that you won’t accomplish all the goals you set for yourself. You could call that failure and beat yourself up for it. You could never set goals, never try, and never fail. Or you could recognize that setting the goal and trying to achieve it is a type of success. The thing is, without goals, you might never fail, but you will certainly never succeed.
- Confront your fear of success
A comedian may have once said that fear of success has to be one fear that really scrapes the bottom of the fear barrel. It does sound a little silly to be afraid of the very goal you’re trying to achieve. But the fact remains that deep down, many of us are afraid of having success. There’s a simple reason for that.
Have you ever heard the saying, with greater privilege comes greater responsibility?
The experience of success is yours alone and that can be a little scary. What if the bottom drops? What if the whole world changes tomorrow? What if your luck runs out?
A successful person cannot blame his boss, the government, or an economic downturn for what are really his own mistakes. He has to own them as his, for good or bad. Scary? A little bit. Exhilarating? Absolutely!!