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.

In the IT world, we have software/applications which come freely aka Open Source stuff. And then we have the evil side which will charge money for everything you intend to get. The war between these 2 monsters have been ongoing for ages now and it’s also quite a funny topic to talk about at times. For example, just the other day, my Australian trainer who was involved in one of the open source project (pretty big one) shared with us some of his past experiences in the project.

One of them happened 5 years ago. This particular open source project managed to catch up with one of the most expensive and popular tool in the world. It’s a very big achievement. But the problem is, the people within the group are so happy and proud of themselves, that 5 years later (now), they have yet to make any significant progress! They are still stuck in the same place 5 years ago! The big achievement 5 years ago has now become nothing….and yet, they are still there celebrating.

This happens in a lot of places especially in companies which have tasted success before. Some are afraid to improve, some don’t see the need to do so, and some are busy enjoying the taste of success. The same thing goes for individuals. Ever wonder what happened to those people who have won awards for certain achievements? Most of them failed to make any impact after that and disappeared into nothingness (though i must admit that sometimes, it is the public’s expectation which ruined them).

The issue with such companies and individuals is not that they do not have the talent or capability to achieve greater heights. The issue is that they never bother to assess (or reassess, for some of them) their position. Assessment is a very important thing to do in order to know where you are and where your next steps (goals) are. By doing that so, you can plan ahead. But if you’re not doing that, you might end up like the open source team – stuck in the past and never move forward. And it could be too late by the time you realized it.

So stop thinking about the fame and glory. Or if you’ve achieved something great before, stop thinking too much about it. It’s just an award to recognize your hard work, and not an award to tell you to stop improving. Remember that our world is moving at a very fast pace. Start assessing your position now and plan ahead before it’s too late to catch up.