subject: Dream Big But Keep your Feet on the Ground [print this page] Dream Big But Keep your Feet on the Ground
You can't read a book; attend a lecture or a seminar on success without getting the proverbial advice telling you that you should dream big. Nothing wrong with that so long as you keep both feet on the ground.
The big dream is like the North Star. If the dream is really big, it should be used mainly as a navigation tool to keep you sailing on course toward your eventual objective and not as an immediate concern.
The reason for that is simple. Before a really big goal can be tackled, it has to be cut down in chewable bite size. You don't set out to earn a million dollars if you are currently earning $25,000 a year.
What needs to be done is keep and eye on the ultimate goal but concentrate on the next step which might be to double your income the next year and so on until the final objective of a million is achieved.
The problem with big dreams is that they have a tendency to put you to sleep. You keep on searching for the perfect plan or formula that will allow you to reach that goal. It simply does not exist. A large building is built one brick at the time and so are big objectives.
Success requires being both idealistic and realistic. It requires lofty and grand thinking but at the same time it demands some practical applications. Success is about opening the mind to what could be, the dream, but it's also about logic, how to get there.
To succeed we need a plan and an overall view of the final objective. The overall view is the first step that has to be taken. That overall view has to be very clearly defined. We must know exactly what the final objective will look like and will feel like. We need to know why we believe that it is so important for us to achieve this goal and exactly what we intend to sacrifice to get it.
Nothing is free. In order to acquire anything we have to give something. That's a frequently overlooked fact. The price that has to be paid is relative to what we expect to gain. It would be nave to think otherwise but it is frequently done.
Once we know exactly what we are reaching for, an incremental plan of execution has to be started. That is, we must make a plan for each separate step that will have to be taken in order to reach the final objective.
As an example, if we wanted to build a hotel, the first step would be to have an architect draw the plan for the building. That would be the overall view. Then would come the incremental plans that would consist of: the financing, finding the location, getting a building contractor, buying the furniture etc.
The incremental plans of executions consist of setting up the strategies that will be used to implement each different phase of the project. It's the breaking down of a large undertaking into chewable bite size. It's the roadmap that will be followed to the desired destination.
To succeed, we have to dream big. We have to dream big but we must also be practical. Dreams, by themselves, never serve practical purposes. That's the reason why we must be a bit weary of those big dreams. It's easy to get lost in our dreams and never achieve anything worthwhile. To achieve, we have to be dreamers but we also need to be incremental doers.
