It is important to set deadlines for your dreams.
It’s not just important, it’s crucial. It’s the difference between ideas and goals, hopes and plans.
You have to know where you want to be in a year or five, because then you can build backwards. You can break down your goals into steps you take each month and week and day. This is called reverse engineering, and it all starts with having at least a vague notion of where you want to be and when.
Yet the pressure to arrive at a certain place at a certain time can sometimes stifle us more than anything.
Sometimes, our anxiety comes from not feeling that we are behind as much as feeling that we are rushing through the course of our lives, trying to force everything to manifest immediately.
Beautiful things take time. Your life takes time. Healing takes time. Are you anxious because you think you’re failing, or are you anxious because you think you won’t be able to succeed immediately? For most people, it’s the latter. And that’s precisely the problem.
The turning point of your life will be the day you decide you are willing to keep working at your goals no matter how long it takes to achieve them. It is the day you are willing to do whatever it takes, for as long as it takes. It is the moment you realize you feel free enough to keep working at your future, no matter if it takes you 10 months or 10 years to arrive.
Your life takes off when you care more about making progress than achieving perfection.
If you have big, huge, life-altering ambitions, it is not going to be a quick change. You want to get to the peak of a mountaintop you cannot even see yet? You are going to have to keep walking, and trust. You are going to have to have faith. You are going to have to fall in love with the journey of it all. You are going to have to let go of the moment you arrive.
Will it be any less blissful if you do not get to the top this year, but next? Or the year after? Of course not.
What if instead of trying to push and pressure and force yourself to get where you want to be as quickly as you can, you decided what your goal is and then committed to working on it every day, for as long as it takes to get there?
What if you could relax into life a little more, while still retaining all of that big-hearted, wide-eyed ambition? What if you could choose what you want, and then let go? Let go into the knowing that what you do each day ultimately determines where you arrive, and that you do not have to force what you are already working on.
Your steps will guide you there, even if you don’t think they will.
If you work at something a little bit, every single day, even if it is just the smallest step, you will get to exactly where you want to be. Not by magic, but by principle.
Stop rushing the timing of your life. You don’t have to achieve everything you’ve ever dreamed of this year. You only have to decide what direction you want to head, and start walking toward it. Then take solace in the fact that you have done what you could, without sacrificing your sanctity of mind, and the quality of your life.
Finally, you are actually getting somewhere.
