Stop Dreaming So Big

Small goals will get you there faster.

I used to have a little card with the words “Dream Big” tucked into my bulletin board. After a few years of glancing at it, I realized I felt nothing for the platitude and threw it out. Ditto the expression “Six Figures.” These are just words unless you can wrap your mind around the actual numbers, and the work required to achieve it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for vision boards, inspirational memes, and morning routines that get your head into a success mindset. But without a plan, most lofty goals just float off until they’re way out of reach.

People are always telling you to reach for the stars and to “go big or go home,” but those concepts could be preventing you from meeting your goals.

Your goals may be too big.

The trouble with big goals…

Big goals and dreams discourage you from starting. It’s not that they’re unachievable. It’s that they’re overwhelming. They can be so overwhelming that from a distance you’re lulled into a dazed belief that your goals are easy to achieve, even without the work. Sounds crazy, but it’s true for many.

For example, many people believe they have a book in them. Maybe you can relate. You’re convinced that someday you’ll write it. It’s written down on your list of goals. You may have started it. Yet, without an action plan, it just never gets going. Most people who say they want to write a book don’t have a clue about what to do first. All they know is that they should be writing. How does a book “get written” anyway?

Or maybe you have a health or fitness goal in mind. Say you want to lose 50 pounds. Every time you visualize that number on your scale, it makes you happy, but every time you pass by the kitchen something else takes over and pulls you in for a snack. Why the disconnect? It’s 100% true that you want to lose weight, so why is it so difficult to start with that first lost pound?

Chunk it down.

The most practical way to get a project done is to start it.

I first heard of the “chunk it down” concept in Jack Canfield’s book The Success Principles. I love this book because it’s a smorgasbord of thought principles and action steps to take to get you to where you want to be. Chunk It Down is Success Principle #8. It’s the one I remember most because it’s the one that works for me.

When I was first starting my writing business, I took copywriting and content writing jobs on elance (now called Upwork). Like most writers, I have a love/hate relationship with my work. I hate writing, but I love having written. What they say about bleeding onto a page… that’s for real.

So how did I motivate myself to start writing each day? I learned to break my jobs down into small goals, even micro-goals, to accomplish them in total.

Take small steps, literally.

When I have an article to write or a lesson to prepare, the first step is to walk my butt up the stairs and enter my office. I know this sounds obvious and lame, but this is how you get stuff done.

I make a cup of coffee, pick up a cat, and get it purring while the coffee brews. I survey any undone housework. Then I put the cat down and pick up my coffee cup. I go upstairs and enter my office. Next, I sit down at my desk, then log into my computer.

And that, folks, is what success looks like to me. I’m a simple girl.

I feel myself getting into the groove as I do these things because I know that within minutes my fingers will be in motion, and I’ll be writing. Ridiculous? Maybe. But writing means sitting down at a desk and looking at a blank page. And most days, it’s as daunting as the day before.

People who stuck with their smaller, daily goals were more likely to stick to their weekly and monthly goals, too.

Your goal must feel real to the touch.

Life Coach Kara Loewentheil says for inspiration, it’s better to tack a hundie to your bulletin board than a fake million dollar bill. A $100 goal means you have to figure out the next steps and do the work. A million-dollar goal is easy to make but impossible to reach if you can’t grasp the amount.

In an interview with Ali Brown on the Podcast Glambition Radio, Loewentheil adds that instead of saying you want to make a 100K next year, she tells her clients to focus on making 8K next month instead. Suddenly the goal is in-your-face real.

Too-big goals are always some ways in the future. But small goals open your eyes to reality because they help you see limitations as your friends. Time no longer feels like a wide-open frontier, nor a restriction because you have simple daily actions to take. You start thinking in terms of how many phone calls you can make today instead.

If you’re going to make $100K, it means you need to make $8K this month and then do it again for the next 11 months. Now how are you going to do that? You need an actual plan. Thirty days go by fast. What are you going to do today?

Make daily progress.

A Yale School of Management study by Kosuke Uetake and Nathan Yang reveals that small victories on a mobile diet app lead to long term success. Researchers found that many users of the weight loss app were motivated to accomplish their daily goals, even the point of bunching their practices (either restricting themselves from food or getting in some exercise before the end of the day) to stay on track. People who stuck with their smaller, daily goals were more likely to stick to their weekly and monthly goals, too.

“We saw this positive spillover where short-term success led to longer-term success,” Uetake said. The secret to meeting a significant health goal is to recognize small wins. Large goals are easy to achieve if a user tracks daily or weekly progress.

Now consider the practical applications for education, energy expenditure, debt repayment, or any goal you want to achieve.

Make it a game.

If you want to take this chunking down approach even further, make it a fun game. Gamifying your goals allows you to separate your wins into rewardable, actionable steps. Everyone likes to win, even when you’re playing against yourself. Winning is a dopamine-loaded state!

Set up a system where you earn points for speed, or for tackling each consecutive step of your project. (For a writer, this might mean I get 20 points for every page written.) Then reward yourself with a treat after a certain number of points accrue. (E.g. after 500 points I get to watch a movie.)

The idea is that if your emotion is involved, you’re stimulated to press on. I use Trello to manage my article writing, but it feels like a game, too. I get a little thrill every time I slide an article from the idea board to the finished board. Even better if it gets added to a publication or curated by Medium.

Mind map your way to creative productivity.

Do you have trouble laying out the steps you need to take? You’re not alone. When you’re feeling ambitious and enthusiastic, a large project can often spin out of control. But you can easily fix that with a mind map.

Back in 2005, with Success Principles, Canfield recommended mind mapping. This still works well for people who want to be more productive when faced with a large project. You get to acknowledge the huge goal by placing it dead center of your page. But you also get a thorough understanding of all the small steps you need to take at the perimeter of the map.

Visual people love mind maps, but mind mappers also claim the practice increases the pace of their work by 44% and saves them an average of 7 hours every week while increasing creativity by 30%. As a writer, I still use a regular old sheet of paper to mindmap but can see the value of keeping things more organized, retaining past mindmaps, and enabling others to join in a project. For that, a mind mapping software program is a great option.

Dream big, but work small.

Next time you’re dreaming about your big vision for the next year, work on a small chunk of it right now. You’ll surprise yourself how fast this moves your dream forward.