If You Dream Big, You’ll Give Up
Quietly kill those ideas of grandeur to build your resilience
Dreaming big is a poor strategy.
Yep, you read that right. Dreaming will ruin things. I fell into this trap fresh out of University trying to build my business alongside a 9–5. Ultimately it failed before it began and the reason was simple: I was constantly dreaming about where it could go instead of keeping my feet on solid ground.
You see, dreaming in itself isn’t a bad thing. Your mind drifts to where you could be, what you could be doing, who you could become. Dreaming allows you to understand you’re desired state. That’s great. But constantly dreaming sets the bar incredibly high and when you do that, disappointment because an inevitability.
Let me explain.
The man trying to reinvent happiness
If you ask anyone what they want from life, likely the answer will be happiness in some shape or form. You might say you want to smile more or enjoy more of life. In a complicated world, most people simplify life down to a cornerstone of feeling better about life.
I get it. It’s exactly what I’d say if someone asked me. Optimising for happiness makes sense. It’s maybe the only thing that does make sense.
Ex-corporate mogel, Mo Gawdat is a man on a mission to encourage the world to be happier. A noble cause I’m sure you’ll agree. It’s even cooler when you start to understand his story, but that’s an article for another time. He’s figured out something that we all could benefit from hearing:
“It’s not the events of our life that make us unhappy, it’s the way we think about them” — Gawdat
Gawdat is one of those people that you can’t help but pay attention to. He’s obviously incredibly smart but he has a sense of wisdom about him that feels magnetic. I think it must be his voice. Anyway, his theory has nailed the happiness thing: Basically don’t expect too much.
Gawdat argues that the reason you and I become so unhappy about life is because we expect too much. We expect the big things. We expect the day to be amazing, the job to be incredible, the exercising to be fun. Then when none of things happen, we are mightily disappointed. The day starts to crumble. And we conclude that we are unhappy. Gawdat recommends shooting for the opposite.
Life is a balance: expectation minus reality equals happiness.
Dreaming smaller
If you find yourself constantly dancing around in your own dreams and you want to minimise the distraction it’s simple: dream smaller. I know it goes against conventional advice but hear me out. Dreaming big is dangerous. Take writing. I’ve been writing for 1.5 years on this platform, it was my pandemic saving grace. I’ve written close to 400 articles and a 275 page book.
Tapping away at the keyboard for the last year has been my therapy through the weirdest period of my life. It’s been incredible for me. More than that, it’s been a coping mechanism for life. Needless to say I’m endlessly grateful to writing for that reason.
But the thing that was different about writing compared to all my other creative pursuits is the lack of expectation. I’ve tried to start several businesses in the past, every side hustle you can imagine, I’ve tried to start it: Amazon FBA, eBay reselling, a sock business, a sweet business. Honestly the list is endless. With every one of those businesses came a hefty dream.
I was planning for thousands of sales before I’d even started. I’d spend months building a website and when it came to launching I thought I deserved hundreds of customers flooding to the website to buy the thing I’d been working on for months. I didn’t. My dreams extended far past where I was and that was the issue.
When you dream smaller you expectations are in line with reality.
You will never think your way to success
It’s why I admire people like Julia Haart, she built her way to incredible success using gel NASA make to build her high-heel empire. She kept her feet on the ground and got to doing instead of thinking.
Success isn’t just a game of thinking. I thought it was. But when that didn’t work I tried a new tactic. I tried doing. And that doesn’t work in the beginning either. My first month of writing I made $1.39. I wrote 13 stories that month. That’s probably the world record for being the worst performing month for the most effort.
If I had grand plans of becoming a full-time writer they were dead in the water right there. If I sat around dreaming about how I’d write a best-seller and then was met with those results I’d have likely given up.
The truth was, when I started writing I had zero expectations. I was just writing. I was doing it because I enjoyed it. Writing was giving me much more than anything material and so every time I turned up, I got much more than I expected. Writing was making me happy.
If you want to build resilience think small, act big.
Final thoughts: Dreaming big leads to failure
Resilience is the aim of the game.
The game of showing up in the absence of results is hard. It’s hard because the human condition craves feedback on it’s behaviour. It’s how we learn. When the feedback is constantly negative on a behaviour you know to be beneficial, like showing up when the results aren’t there, it’s hard to fight your basic cognition.
You can fight this by dreaming smaller in the micro and think big in the macro. Tell yourself you’ll be a best seller in ten years. Tell yourself you’ll write for 3 hours tomorrow and no one will read your work.
So after months and months of work, my first book is out, you can order it here and get full access to my writing here.
