Your Dreams Don’t Belong in the Future
Don’t put it farther than it needs to be.
You give your dreams too much credit.
It doesn’t deserve to be so far ahead of you.
It doesn’t deserve your “one day”.
It’s glorious, I’ll give you that — it’s bathed in all the right oils and worshipped with each passing moon.
But it’s not all that. Placing your dream so high and so far away only ensures you will never reach it.
We need to change our perception of dreams, goals, aspirations, etc.
Your dreams are far away because you put them there.
From now on, you’re gonna think of your dreams as an active and ongoing process that is happening now.
Why? Because you should be working toward it, now.
When we place our dreams on a pedestal and hope to achieve them “one day”, we do three things:
- We take away the sense of urgency to work on it daily.
- We end up overestimating the time it may actually take to achieve the goal and move on to new things.
- We make that dream the “end all be all” even though it would be better to surpass that goal and achieve even more (the moment you feel like you’ve “made it” or “reached the end” you stop growing; if you’re not growing, your dying).
The distant future isn’t motivating enough to move you to do anything about it now.
It almost makes it seem like if we “serve our time” and survive until some future moment in our lives, the dream will just fall into our lap. We forget that in order to reach that dream we had to have been working on it day in and day out up until that point.
You are closer than you think.
Thinking that your goals will be achieved deep in the distant future will cause you to relax. It makes you too comfortable.
It makes you feel like you are still extremely far away.
Even if it doesn’t — let’s say you have your goals deep in the future but you haven’t relaxed, you’re grinding daily — then it is likely you will reach that goal way quicker than you thought.
I’ve heard plenty of stories about how people wish they didn’t place their goals so far ahead in the future because it made them move more slowly toward them.
Once they realized that they were overestimating the time it took to reach them, they pivoted and started achieving more in less time.
They were overestimating the time it would take.
The danger is that if you do this, you could be spending all of your life working toward a goal because it is supposed to be your “life’s work”. When you reach that point, you will only wonder what’s next.
You’ve spent years mulling over in your head about how this goal is “the end”, and now you’ve reached it. Though you were happy at the moment, the moment has passed and you aren’t fulfilled.
You realize that the fulfillment comes from the journies you take, accomplishing dream after dream, not necessarily the one dream itself.
If your goals are too far in the future, you will act like it is.
You can do so much more.
Stop putting it so far off. It’s happening now. You are working, now.
Putting your dreams far off in the future can make you feel depressed, even. If you think you are far away, at some point you may even consider the dream impossible or likely not to happen.
Start making some deadlines. Start making some changes. Find that consistent thing you can do daily that is going to move the needle forward.
Once you hack at something long enough, eventually it falls down.
I’m asking you to acknowledge the moment, work toward your dreams now, realize that they don’t have to take thirty years if it’s up to you, and move on to the next spark that lights your soul on fire every time you think of it.
Do remember, though, that dreams can still take a long time to come to fruition or be actualized.
Most people, in this world of instant gratification, have a tendency to think they will achieve their dreams in a short period of time due to their lack of patience.
Don’t do that either.
The danger goes both ways:
You can either think you 're going to achieve your dreams too soon in the future or think you will achieve them too far future. Both have their dangers.
Instead, simply think there’s a potential your dreams don’t have to take as long as you think they will, and whether they do, you’re gonna work toward them as if they can be achieved tomorrow.
This will ensure that you don’t take longer than need be to actualize those precious dreams of yours.
Don’t get comfortable with the distance.
Don’t get comfortable with the gap.
Work to close it.