Making a DREAM a REALITY
According to a Dominican University Research study, we are more likely to achieve our goals when we write them down. I sincerely believe it and I have been doing it for years.
Write them down in a notebook.
Why a notebook?
Simply because it’s not a bit of paper (which you end up losing), you can keep it in your bag, it’s a great visual way and you can see where you’ve gone by annotating on it what you’ve already accomplished. When you want to achieve things that are bigger than you: you have to write somewhere your action plan: what you are going to do to achieve them. What are the steps.
For example: Saving a cash down for a house – that’s the dream. Because until you get your hands dirty, its name is DREAM. The purpose of this is to write a date to that dream. I know that’s the part that scares us. Write the one you like, being as realistic as possible (if you haven’t collected a single penny yet, putting the date in 6 months might be a little unrealistic). But you have the right to dream big and you already have a plan to raise money super fast; then write 6 months. I don’t think the date is something we should be paying too much attention to. We need to focus on moving forward, even in small steps. The important thing is not to stop. So, write a date. This is when your dream is called GOAL.
DREAM—–> GOAL
You have a goal of saving a cashdown for your house! There, you have to go to the other stage, which is the PLAN. And when you make a plan, you describe the actions you are going to take in order to achieve your goal. Based on our example: you need to know how much you need to save to have enough for your cashdown. Say for a $ 300,000 house you need a 5% cashdown, which equals $ 15,000 The goal is even clearer now: you want to save $ 15,000 in the next 3 years (for example). Your goal should be broken down into different steps. And this is where you have to make a plan. How are you going to save that money?
That will be the ACTIONS.
For example: the first action could be to open a savings account separate from your checking account. An account that you can only add money and not withdraw … Your second action might be to put all the money you make overtime, into that account. Other actions: find a side hustle (surveys online), automate your savings, set a budget, etc. Do you have a talent (sewing, baking, etc.) that you could share with the world by selling it? The internet is full of ideas for making extra money.
DREAM—–>GOAL—–>PLAN—–>ACTIONS
You write down all the actions you plan to do in the notebook first. Then you rewrite them in the agenda as you accomplish them.
You write it down and you can even highlight them. Or make a hook next to it.
It will help you remember a few weeks later, that you had done this action.
What I do is I write in my notebook my goal: to buy a cottage (this is the biggest dream of my life!) and then I describe the steps to achieve this goal. Below, you will find: save $20,000, get information about the insurance prices in the different cities i am interested in, watching the cottages for sale from time to time (to see the prices, the market and find my style). And put the sub-actions of each action: put the money I receive for my birthday and for Christmas in the cottage account, at each paycheck, put $100 in that account. These are the sub-actions that I will write in my agenda (not to forget and especially to force me to do so). The will is certain, but sometimes we have temptations towards other things too. Take the money and go shopping for example.
But I find when writing it, it makes us more to do what we had written. All these actions will eventually lead to your dream come true.
DREAM—–>GOAL—–>PLAN—–>ACTIONS—–>REALITY
Don’t forget, go at your own pace. In fact, sometimes we don’t choose our rhythm either. Life happens! The important thing is not to back down. Keep our agenda and notebook close to us and refer to it often: to find out where we are.
