Last year started with a dream and ambitions to live those dreams, but the year went by and it is still a dream. Is it really difficult to follow through dreams and achieve goals?

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Expanded perspective

We start our year with dreams, hopes and resolutions that this year we will achieve our goals. We are excited about our goals and feel this is THE year and we will finally be able to achieve what we always hoped for and wanted to achieve. After a few exciting days, we lose track of our goals and the aspirations just fade away. Is it really so difficult to keep up with your goals throughout the year? Let’s try and understand why we struggle to keep up with our goals and what can we do to make sure that we stay on track for a longer time.

Dreams don’t come real without efforts

All that you have done in life so far has taken efforts. The bigger the goals the more effort it needs to achieve them. A dream is a goal that has been created in your stream of thoughts and is waiting to come to reality. The longer you hold that dream the more difficult it becomes for that dream to be realized. You need to understand the importance of working on these dreams. If not you, who will bring it to reality?

Goals are just imaginations

The dream that you have been building upon will just stay a dream if you don’t work on it. The goal or the dream or the change you are wanting to have doesn’t exist. It is just the creation of your mind and when you work on it, things will be different, but better and most importantly, real. Living in a reality is fun and exciting but you will have to come out of your world of dreams into reality.

Nothing is perfect

The way one hopes things will happen is often very different from how things actually happen. This learning from past experiences keeps people from taking a step forward towards their biggest goals in life. These are the big goals and people have so many plans and hopes how to realize those goals. When one starts working on those goals, reality hits and things are not that easy or not what was hoped for.

You start dwelling on things and inferring that maybe it is not the right time, maybe you are not well prepared to achieve the goal. These are all the excuses one makes to not work on your goals and you are not wrong. You have learnt to do things your way, but this is where goals are different. You don’t just achieve it, you have to work towards it from an imperfect start to a close to a perfect finish.

The goals are goals because they are big for you. When you achieve goals your life can change in a big way.  It is this change that you want to be prepared for and want things to be perfect. You keep waiting for this perfection and time keeps passing…

In search of this delusive perfection, you give up on your dreams, thinking maybe you are not good enough or not disciplined enough. Stop waiting for things to fall in place or stars to align, just start with small steps.

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Small Habits

Everything starts small and one of the pitfalls of not being able to achieve goals is the ambitious nature of goals. Most goals are long term and it is difficult to see rewards instantly, making it difficult to follow through. To achieve goals you need to break it down into small habits.

Small habits are everyday actions that you keep doing until they become automated and are part of your lifestyle. Small habits are already part of your life, for eg. brushing your teeth, is a small habit with a goal to keep healthy dental hygiene throughout your life.

Let’s say you want to achieve a goal of reading 10 nonfiction books in 2019. To read 10 books you need to start with a habit of reading every single day. Be practical with your goals and start thinking long term. Let’s do some simple math to make the goal more practical and set our daily habit.

An average book is about 300 pages.
300 pages x 10 books = 3000 pages.
3000 pages / 365 days = 8.2 pages in a day.

So to achieve the goal of reading 10 books in a year you need to start with reading 8 pages in a day. 8 pages in a day would roughly mean 15 mins – 30 mins of reading per day.

Having this small and simple habit of reading 30 mins in a day can help you achieve your goal in 12 months. You need to shift your mind to long-term thinking. 8 pages don’t look to be significant progress, but it will add up towards accomplishing your goal.

You need to shift your mindset towards the beauty of persistence and daily habits to achieve goals. You need to love the process of achieving a goal. The feeling that you have achieved something is a very short feeling. You will spend all the time building up to that achievement and working towards it. The process is more memorable than the feeling of achieving a goal.

“Fall in love with the process and the results will come.” — Eric Thomas

Keep a check on yourself

It is difficult to keep a check on the progress when the goals are long term. Like creating daily habits, it is important to track your progress every single day. Tracking your progress not only helps you stay focused, but will also keep you accountable. Make sure you are mindful of the actions or progress you are making every single day towards your goal.

Set weekly and monthly milestones to make sure that you are making progress. As quoted in the above example, your one-week goal can be to finish 2 chapters of a particular book with a monthly goal to finish that book. Keep a daily journal to write your daily progress or use an app to set reminders. Pick your own method to stay on track and get closer to your goal every single day.

Be flexible

Having milestones will help you accelerate or decelerate your progress and plan your focus more clearly. Be flexible about your goals, they are your goals and you don’t have to push every single day. It is not ideal if the process becomes stressful, so make sure the small daily habits don’t feel like a chore that you detest. This will also help you figure out which goals are worth pursuing.

This is the year!

There is just one simple secret to achieve goals, GET STARTED! Maybe you have tried last year to follow through on a goal and failed, it doesn’t matter. It is your life and your goal. If the goal is big enough it is worth working towards it no matter how many times you fail. Life is long enough to achieve big goals and you will only fail if you give up. Make this year count, this is the year where you should just start.

Share your big goals in the comments sections below, we can work together towards achieving it. We at DoRemember are working towards our goal to make every day worth remembering.