Dreams vs. Goals

bypledgerwood

119 followers

8 years ago

It's dreams that draw most of us to a program like this.

I remember back when I was in college and looking at a job opening for a financial advisor position. The salary was almost $80k a year. Back when I was saddled with a ton of debt and working as a short order cook, that sounded like a fortune. It made me dream of a different life.

After school, my dream never really left and, as a result, I got sucked into about every money-making scheme you can imagine. MLMs were just starting to hit the Internet, and I feel like I've done them all (BTW: anyone need any shampoo or granola bars?).

I've wasted a lot of money for the ability not to make any money at all except for the people who "recruited" me. How did this happen? Was I stupider than everyone else? Well, possibly, but one aspect of my failure was that I was buying a dream instead of thinking about goals.

Dreams are good. Dreams motivate us to action. They help us see past our present circumstances to a better world of what could be.

The problem is that it takes quite a bit of incremental change to move your world closer and closer to your dream. I had no goals. I had no concept of incremental growth. All I had to compare my progress to was the dream, and when that's all you've got, you're constantly coming up short. There's a sense in which you've set yourself up to fail, because instead of thinking, "Hey, it's three months later, and I made an extra $100! That's great progress!" You're thinking, "Hey, it's been three months, and I'm no closer to my first million than I was at the beginning."

It's important to have dreams, but it might be even more important to have small goals that move you closer to that dream. If I have no smaller goals than, "Make a million dollars ASAP," I'm bound to be discouraged most of the time, because most of the time, I won't be making that million dollars. I'll give up.

But if I can think of smaller milestones along the way - maybe $10 my first month. $30 over the next two months. $100 by my first six months. Or maybe that's too small, I don't know, but you get my point. If I have smaller goals that move me closer to my dream, I'm bound to stick with it and, instead of having a long slog of defeat and discouragement, I'll have a chain of victories.