Shoot for the stars!
Don’t think small!
You’ll never get anywhere with small dreams!
We’ve all heard it before, right? Most success books or motivational speakers will teach you to dream big. And then there’s that whole group of people who will shoot down your dreams.
We Call Them Dream Killers.
We’re told to avoid them. Or at least not to talk about our dreams around them.
At least that’s what I teach my students.
Then I find myself listening to students share their big dreams with me, and so often I feel like I need to re-center them and bring them back to reality.
I have that battle going on inside me saying,
“Don’t be a dream killer!”…
And then thinking,
“…but they need to know that it’s never going to happen that way!”
I have others confront me when I say,
“Nothing is impossible, don’t steal their dream from them!”
And I completely agree with this statement…
…And on the other hand I do not agree with it.
Where is the tension coming from? Why am I struggling with this battle while dealing with my students? The last thing in the world that I want to be is a dream killer. I’m in the business of helping people to make their dreams come true and I want nothing more than that.
So, what’s going on?
What’s Realistic?
That’s a good question.
I was had someone come to me and tell me they wanted to be a billionaire and they were going to do it while flipping single family homes.
He was making a big name for himself in my market, sponsoring every event he could, touting every deal he was doing. But I’ve been around for a long time. I’ve watched many flippers (I’ve done my fair share of flips as well) and I’ve gotten a peek into the back room of many flipping business across the country.
The best of single family home flippers in the entire country, if they could maintain the pace of their very best years and even increase their business year after year and live to 120 years old, would not become billionaires in the single family home flipping business.
I tried telling this person that they needed to flip about 150,000-200,000 single family homes in their lifetime in order to make this happen. There just aren’t enough hours in 120 years for someone to do this. By the time he pays his taxes, covers expenses, pays a staff, etc. he would still likely not be there.
I Wasn’t Trying to Kill His Dream.
When I was telling him that it wasn’t going to happen, I was trying to steer him toward something that would get him there.
If he really wanted to be a billionaire, he needed a different vehicle. I told him that he needed to build a business, or he needed to deal with much larger properties like giant office buildings, hospitals, shopping malls, etc. If he made $100,000,000 a deal, he would still have to pull off 10 of those in his lifetime. That’s certainly more doable, but it would require an awful lot of work.
So, therein lies the next issue…
An Awful Lot of Work.
Recently I had a student telling us that he was going to have a career year. He was going to make 5-10 more than he ever made in his life.
This is doable, but there was a problem. The plan (there really wasn’t one) was to dream big and hope that would get him over the hurdle.
All dreams are possible if the actions associated with that dream support it.
You can’t take the actions that $100,000-a-year investor does and expect those actionhs to turn into a $1,000,000 a year enterprise. If you want ten times the results, you need to put in or apply about 10 times the action.
If you want to be a millionaire/billionaire, you need to do what millionaires/billionaires do.
You Can’t Think Big and Act Small.
The same goes for life in general. I can’t say that I want to have a fantastic relationship with my spouse and expect that to happen. I need to do what people who have fantastic relationships do.
There’s specific actions that needs to be tied to your dream.
So Bottom Line?
Dream BIG—that’s what a Vision is all about!
But also, know that it is going to require massive action on your part to make it happen—specific, intentional, well-thought actions that are congruent with your big end-game. That’s the difference between having a Lifeonaire’s Vision and a pipe-dreamer’s big fantasy.
What do you think? Would love to hear from you with a comment below.
Blessings,
—Steve