You need to quit using this one innocent word. It’s slowly killing your dreams.
How to follow a practical, proven, simple process that plots out the path of your dreams into today’s to-do list by changing how you connect time.
“Someday starts now.” — Martha Brockenbrough
For some it comes easy, but when we can get clear and see that ONE thing we really want to have in our lives someday, is the beginning of an intentional and potentially fulfilled life.
That one thing we’re aspiring towards becomes our north star and can be the thing that we orientate all our actions towards. It simplifies life by creating barriers to the endless incessant unnecessaries of life.
But once we have a big thing to go after, a goal worthy of our attention and energy for the next few years, we need to actually take it from a dream and into something we can actually make progress on daily with practical, easy to do steps.
We need to go from someday to today.
People will often stop at the word ‘someday’ and no wonder. It feels good to acknowledge a dream verbally because it can trigger the release of the reward neurochemical dopamine.
This is what our brain rewards us with when we actually achieve something, it’s one of the reasons why us humans have survived for so long.
So, to get a dose of dopamine for just talking about potential achievements of course can strip percentage points off someone’s drive and with it increase the probabilities that that future someday will actually never arrive.
(And if you’ve ever said you’ll do something later and not scheduled to do it, I’m gonna bet, on most occasions, that little thing never got done. Come on be honest.)
So I submit that we shouldn’t share our dreams.
Well only under one condition.
We shouldn’t utter them out loud unless we’re willing to put a date and a plan behind them and turn them into goals and hold ourselves publicly accountable for going after them and getting them done.
“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
No-one likes that person who talks about their faded dreams that they could have or should have perused in some rose tinted past convenient circumstances.
Nope. I don’t want to be that guy. I want to take my dreams into reality and if you want to too, here’s what we can do instead.
We can borrow Gary Keller’s framework of ‘goal setting to the now’, which uses reverse engineering to go from the ‘clouds to the dirt’ as Gary Vaynerchuck would say. Moving from the abstract, low-resolution images of our dreams to the nitty gritty micro details of right now.
Here’s how:
(1) Based on my someday goal, what’s the ONE Thing I can do in the next five years to be on track to achieve it?
(2) Now, based on my five-year goal, what’s the ONE Thing I can do this year to be on track to achieve my five-year goal, so that I’m on track to achieve my someday goal?
(3) Now, based on my goal this year, what’s the ONE Thing I can do this month so I’m on track to achieve my goal this year, so I’m on track to achieve my five-year goal, so I’m on track to achieve my someday goal?
(4) Now, based on my goal this month, what’s the ONE Thing I can do this week so I’m on track to achieve my goal this month, so I’m on track to achieve my goal this year, so I’m on track to achieve my five-year goal, so I’m on track to achieve my someday goal?
(5) Now, based on my goal this week, what’s the ONE Thing I can do today so I’m on track to achieve my goal this week, so I’m on track to achieve my goal this month, so I’m on track to achieve my goal this year, so I’m on track to achieve my five-year goal, so I’m on track to achieve my someday goal?
(6) So, based on my goal today, what’s the ONE Thing I can do right NOW so I’m on track to achieve my goal today, so I’m on track to achieve my goal this week, so I’m on track to achieve my goal this month, so I’m on track to achieve my goal this year, so I’m on track to achieve my five-year goal, so I’m on track to achieve my someday goal?
By following this process, we connect our dream to our daily reality. Everything links up sensibly like dominoes.
The hard part now is to actually show up and do the work that we know we need to do. And as you can see there is no place to hide.
There are no hacks. No elevators. There’s only one way up and that’s taking the metaphorical stairs. Meaning, showing up and taking action on just one thing.
Again, and again.
Sounds simple enough, so why do so many of us fall at this stage?
Because simple is not always easy.
Many of us do not properly prepare and underestimate how difficult it is emotionally, to do the simple things, (even just one thing!) that we know we must do.
But the silver lining is the fact we need to just focus on one thing.
This is not about being a productivity monkey, trying to outcompete others with our to-dos and hours worked.
Sure we may have certain streaks in the year where we feel on fire and can go for hours and do far more than just one thing. In fact there’ll be days where one thing feels like a personal insult to us, as though having our past selves assign us only one simple thing to do for the day is a slight on our abilities!
But these streaks often don’t last as long as we need them to. It’s not about how hard or how fast we can act.
No. Instead this is all about a different way of thinking and therefore acting. This is about utilizing leverage.
With this approach, we’re always looking for that one thing that has the maximum effectiveness. And when we act with that, we don’t measure it by looking at how much we did, but rather how well it was done, and of course the fact that it was done!
(And do not underestimate our ability to set out a copious list of to-dos only to excuse ourselves because life got in the way. Note: life always gets in the way. That’s why with just one thing to do in a day, we can’t hide behind any excuses!)
And over the days and weeks and eventually months and years, if we can just keep our eyes ahead on the one thing in front of us every day, we’ll be able to look back and see that lots of little ‘well done one-things’ have taken us far closer to our dream than any flurry of inconsistent productivity or any future unscheduled someday could ever have done.
