Move one step at a time
Throughout the history of our world, big dreams have always been our source of inspiration – the first man to walk on moon, the invention of the telephone, the wheel, etc. We just love big dreams, don’t we? Something for us to look up to, and something for us to create and work hard for.
The good news is, it’s not difficult at all to come out with big dreams. In fact, anyone can come out with one…or more than one at any given time!
Now the bad news is, most people won’t be able to achieve them. Not because they’re unlucky or not talented, but because of the way they approach big dreams. Most of the people will just go all-out towards the big dreams.
And what happens next? They become tired very fast and give up. And the big dreams? Gone. They’ll be too demotivated to carry on…so they take a break. Few weeks or few months later, they would come back STRONGER than ever and set new big dreams. Then they go all out towards it (again)….and soon, history would repeat itself – they become exhausted and demotivated to carry on.
See the issue here? The issue here is that people tend to set up big dreams and then just dive straight into it….without dividing them into smaller portions. It’s like saying you want to climb Mount Everest and just head straight into it, hoping you can conquer it within a single day. Or saying you want to earn $1000 per day by blogging, and start to write blog posts… hoping that people would notice you in a week’s time. Well, all I can say is…. you have the right direction (the big dream) but you’re taking the wrong and unplanned approach.
The thing is, we human love to see progress and we feel motivated by it. If we don’t see any progress then sooner or later, we’ll become demotivated and give up. This is the thing with big dreams. We set an end goal which is too difficult for us to achieve easily, so we become burnout pretty soon because there’s no way for us to notice any significant progress towards our goal.
What we should do then, is to divide the so-called big dream, or end goal, into many smaller parts. Set them up in a way that you can accomplish them easily. Once completed, you will feel more motivated and move on to the next one. And before you know it, all these smaller parts have actually managed to help you move closer to that big dream of yours. And you still have a lot of energy left for the final push!
- Set up the big dream
- Separate it into smaller milestones
- Work on the milestones one by one
- Once you’re done with 1 milestone, stop a while and notice the progress. Gather as much motivation as you can from there.
- Continue with the next milestone
So remember, everyone (me, you, your family members, friends, bosses) loves to see progress. If there’s no progress, you will get bored and tired easily, and eventually you will give up. Learn to separate a big end goal into smaller ones that you can achieve. Make use of the progress you make to push yourselves further.
Last but not least, always bear in mind that pursuing your big dreams is never going to be easy. It’s going to be a long long journey so you will need to gather any form of positive energy you can get during the journey. Oh, and don’t forget that pursuing that big dream of your should be fun and exciting…not tiring and boring.

Been hanging around project managers haven’t you.
I agree, you have a better chance of success if you attack a challenge in small orderly chunks, provided your target isn’t moving as fast as a cheetah or changing as fast as mt friend’s gf’s mind. The irony is that many successful businesspeople have chaotic brains. That’s why they hire managers, to put some structure into things. Even then, as soon as they set up a structure, the market changes and its back to square one.
So on top of good methods that you point out, you also want speed. Money to pay those managers helps too.
Damien Tan
29 Oct 09 at 8:34 am
aiyo . when i was young , i always aim 80 marks for A , but i get 60 marks only . Then my mama tell me to aim 100 marks , so that i can get 80 marks . It worked . But it felt like shit cause i failed to get 100 marks .
gapnap´s last blog ..Cry for you . Because i am a jealous man .
gapnap
29 Oct 09 at 10:26 am
@Damien Tan
Everything is about speed now. The faster you produce something, the better it is. The faster you fix a problem, the better it is. Even the speed we process our food is getting faster.
That’s why sometimes i feel that a big dream is very hard to achieve if you don’t divide it into smaller parts, and if you are working all by yourself.
@gapnap
er…then nxt time u should tell ur kids to aim 120
Alvin Lim
29 Oct 09 at 9:58 pm
yeap yeap , so if i take one step at a time , like i aim 65 , 70 ..i may not achieve it ..
If i aim far , i will fail ..but heck it did get me somewhere
gapnap
30 Oct 09 at 11:41 am
@gapnap
u do need to aim far (big dream) and then go one step at a time to reach there (study slowly). do u think u can jump right into a test w/o following the smaller steps and expect to get 100?
Alvin Lim
30 Oct 09 at 5:47 pm