How I Developed the Superpower of Achieving Anything I Set My Mind To

Having a life worth living is hard, right?

I mean, sure, you have a dream, you break it down into goals and achieving goals takes lots of steps that you achieve in even tinier steps, right? It all takes a lot of time, right? And sure, you can probably do anything you set your mind to, but if the goal is truly meaningful and worth achieving it will be hard and intimidating. Right?

Uh, maybe ... not.

Like you I used to believe all those things and never really did any of the audacious things I dreamed of. Turns out I was wrong.

It’s true that you need to take tiny steps, but it is not true that those would inevitably include things that were painful and intimidating.

In fact reaching your goals is actually totally INEVITABLE. That's right, inevitable!

Let’s clarify some terms

A dream is something you want to achieve; say helping people resolve business challenges, while getting to travel around the world.

A mission is something you need to fulfill that dream. Like a map of the dream. In this example a mission could be to develop the tools and teaching methods to help people resolve the business challenges and to build a business that allows me the type of flexibility and income to live my version of a rich life.

As you can see neither the vision, nor the missions are particularly specific.

This was my first stumbling block. I believed that I had to make my grand fuzzy vision into a clearly described very specific goal. (True.) I believed that to be specific I needed to add things like „By the time I’m 35“ or „6-figure income“. (False.) Can you see how that ups the pressure? And doesn't do anything to tell me how to actually do the thing? Yeah, not so good.

How this really works

A goal is something much more benign. A goal is a component of the map, say a country road. Once you travel the road you are closer to fulfilling the mission. In our example it might be something like holding a single workshop on this one thing that you are pretty sure will help people be more awesome, so that when you have done it you can analyze the results and learn more. Can you see how that seems much more doable, way less intimidating? Yes.

As you go through breaking down a particular goal you will see that many parts, like the teaching and the organization for example, seem super doable. Only some parts will be really frightening, say marketing; how to find the right people for the workshop.

This is your pressure point. Pressure that builds up into pain if you try to manage the full weight if it.

I used to think that I would just need to get the eff over myself. Now I know better. This is the point where we need to do those steps at the beginning of the article. And not just a little bit. We need to take apart this pain point until it is crushed into dust on our country road. A dust so fine that taking a piece of it seems ridiculously easy, like full on, belly-laughing, ridiculously easy. Say step one is asking your bestie for advice. Can you ask your bestie for advice? Sure you can.

With each step, with each grain of dust, you tick off, you eliminate a piece of the pressure point. Carrying a piece of dust from A to B is something we can do every day! Can you see the amazing thing that happened here? Something that seemed hard turned into something that would inevitably happen. Just like that.

On the surface you know what you have to do, but do you really get it that you can do anything you set myour mind to?

Yoda said: "Do, or not do. There is no try." How about this year you don't try to achieve your goal, be it a side business, a book, or a sabbatical. How about this time you break it down so fine that all there is, is the choice to do?