Hello! Seiiti Arata. There is a very dangerous idea in the world of personal development, which is the idea that you can do everything. Be careful with believing that you have the potential to accomplish anything you want just by trying hard enough.
This idea has been spread for a long time with the aim of motivating people to pursue their dreams, to not settle, to think big.
The problem is that this need to be excellent prevents you from being good. It seems contradictory, but that’s it. When you keep feeding big dreams, you forget to take the small practical actions you could do today to improve your life.
I’ll explain this contradiction to you by showing how you can achieve big goals by acting small. But first let’s understand why the craze for greatness is a problem for your life.
The craze for greatness increases your chances of failure. Instead of having a big goal, prefer to have a series of small goals.
Thinking of grandiose plans is very seductive. You wonder what your life would be like if you had several millions in the bank, if you owned a giant company, if you had the body of an athlete or the fame of a celebrity.
We are taught that these grand goals motivate us to act. And that may be true at first, but what happens next? For almost all people, what happens is failure. We didn’t get the millions we wanted, we didn’t become owners of an empire of companies, we didn’t become beautiful or famous.
And this is quite logical. The greater our plans, the greater our chances of failure.
A grandiose plan can get us to act in the beginning, it can get us out of inertia. But the effort to achieve such an objective outside of our reality is enormous. Most of us will not be able to maintain the discipline necessary to achieve these lofty goals for so long. And the frustration of not being able to do it brings that feeling of overload, that feeling that we’re not good enough.
With that feeling of failure in the back, we end up not doing the simplest things that we could be doing to improve our lives now. We enter a vicious cycle: we make grandiose plans, we start to act, we do not reach the goal and we feel like failures. And then we draw new grandiose plans and the cycle begins again.
The solution to get out of this vicious cycle is to turn those grandiose dreams into smaller, shorter and simpler goals.
The obsession for greatness takes your focus off the practical and objective world. Without practical actions, no dream becomes reality.
When we are guided by the obsession for greatness, we want to eat more than we can chew. We want to be a mega-entrepreneur even before being a small entrepreneur. We want to have a million without first making one thousand. We want to change the world, but we can’t even make our bed.
Psychology calls this behavior megalomania, a condition characterized by delusional fantasies and disproportionate self-esteem. Some great names in history were megalomaniacs and accomplished great deeds. We tend to use these big names as inspiration, but the truth is that for each one that has been successful, thousands of others have only failed.
If grandiose plans tend to fail, we can also conclude that small, simple and objective plans tend to succeed.
What’s easier? Found an empire of companies with hundreds of employees to make millions internationally or found a small individual business to offer products or services locally where you live?
It is much easier to stay focused on a simple, short and objective plan. When you have such a simple goal, your chances of success are greatly increased. And you can use that sense of success to chart a new simple, short and objective plan.
That is, you enter a virtuous cycle of small successes instead of being caught in a vicious cycle of grandiose plans that never come true.
By doing this, you are able to go up step by step, little by little, reaping practical results that change your life today, on a daily basis. This may not seem as seductive as imagining yourself as a rich, beautiful and famous person. But it brings much more practical results to your life.
What do you prefer, anyway? Dreaming of a million bucks that never reaches your account or having a thousand in your hand today? Dreaming about what your body would look like after losing twenty kilos or seeing your weight drop one kilo on the scale today?
The greatness of a plan depends on each person. Your plan must be appropriate to your ability to act.
Your plan should be as short and simple as your ability to stay focused. The discipline of each of us has a limit. It is up to you to know and understand your own limits to outline a simple plan that you are able to fulfill. A plan that is simple for someone else can be great for you. After all, each of us has a different ability to maintain focus and constant action.
So, draw up a plan that matches your capabilities. I strongly recommend that you look at classes 06 and 07 in the Planning Your Life course for this. If you are unable to carry out this plan, you are probably still thinking too big. Rephrase, see what’s beyond your capabilities and make it even simpler.
You may think this is thinking small. It is not. It is a very pragmatic thought. You outline a plan that is within your current capabilities. When you fulfill this plan, you expand your capabilities a little. And then you can draw another plan with another simple objective, within your new capabilities.
And so, plan by plan, success by success, you are getting closer and closer to a grand goal. Gradually, with focus, discipline and patience, you will become the person you always wanted to be.
We insist on grandiose plans out of laziness to act. The craze for greatness is a form of procrastination.
Everything we’ve talked about so far is very logical. It doesn’t take much thinking to understand that a grand plan is more likely to fail than a simple goal. But why do we insist on grandiose plans even though we know this?
There is an explanation for our craze for greatness. And that reason is the good old procrastination, the mania to keep leaving for later what we should be doing now.
Grandiose and seductive plans do not work because they distract you from what is really important: practical, concrete action on a daily basis.
The only way to get in shape is to exercise and eat well every day. The only way to earn more money is to work to increase the value of our work. The only way to learn a new language is to practice it every day.
It’s simple. And maybe that’s why our brain is not so fascinated with those baby steps. Here among us, let’s agree that it is much more attractive to formulate grandiose plans to have the body of our dreams than to face the reality of waking up early, putting on your sneakers and going to exercise routinely.
But this is the secret. It is creating new habits. It is willing to do the daily, repetitive work.
If your grand plans were distracting you, then now is the time to do what really matters. Let’s act together and create effective plans that really change your life, in practice.
The craze for greatness keeps you from being big as it takes your focus off the action and puts your attention on an imaginary future that is unlikely to come true. The solution to this is to break down these grandiose plans into smaller, simpler goals. In the Planning Your Life course you will see that from goal to goal, you get closer to the grandeur that attracts us so much.
Yes, you can achieve many of your dreams. You just need to end this craze for greatness of wanting everything at the same time, of wanting to jump to success without going through real action.
For those of you who are willing to act this way, I invite you to start today setting up a life plan with simple, practical and objective goals. A life plan that contemplates the next practical steps you need to take today to make your dreams come true.
You can start putting this plan together right now by attending a special class in the Planning Your Life course on personal values. To see this class, just visit this link here.