How to Follow Your Dreams

Co-authored by Trudi Griffin, LPC, MS

Last Updated: August 7, 2024 References

We all have goals in life, things that we dream of doing or being. They may be small or they may require years of work. Following your dreams may not always be easy. You'll never achieve a long-term goal by just sitting and day-dreaming about it. You will instead need to commit to a vision, carefully plan, and learn how to stay focused for months or even years. While reaching your dream might be hard, with organization, motivation, and self-discipline you can do it.

Part 1

Part 1 of 3:

Making a Plan

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Discover your passion. Maybe you want to be a writer, because you imagine being featured by Oprah and traveling the world to promote your book on a big publisher's dime. But these are ideals and have little to do with the reality of writing a book. Writing a book is very hard work, and it doesn't end there. Then comes editing, finding a publisher (probably not a big publishing house if you are unknown), and then tirelessly promoting your book using your own money. This is not to discourage you, but to make it clear that you need to be motivated by more than ideals. You need to be passionate about your dream, passionate enough to grit your teeth and push through the hard times, to keep going even when harsh realities hit. Find your passion and analyze whether or not you think that you can achieve it.^{[1]
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- Try writing your goals down. Which one is the most important to you? Which do you feel most excited or passionate about?
- Be specific. Saying, “I want to teach” is not very specific. You need to have a goal that is detailed, measurable, and allows you to properly plan. A better goal is, “By 2025 I want to be a professor in English and teach at a college.”
- Think about what skills you might need to accomplish this goal. If you are terrified of public speaking, you will need to work on feeling at-ease speaking in front of large groups of people. Know that this is a skill you will need to work on to achieve your dream.
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Imagine your ideal life. One way to discover your passion and what you really want your life to look like is to visualize your ideal life. Close your eyes and picture your life, or write it on a piece of paper. Try asking yourself questions like:
- What are you doing for a career?
- Where are you living?
- Who is with you?
- What do you look like?
- What are you wearing?
- How do you feel? (Happy? Fulfilled?)
- You can even try writing out your ideal day, start to finish, starting with what time you wake up. This can give you even more clues about the life you want.
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Create a long-term vision. Consider how your goal fits into a long-term vision for your life. This should help you to further refine your ambitions. For example, how do you want to live in the future? What kind of work do you want to do? How do you want to spend your time? Take all of these things into account.^{[2]
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- Let your vision shape your long-term goals. There are a lot of different kinds of colleges, for example. What kind is best suited for you? A big university? A community college? A private, liberal arts school?
- Weigh advantages and disadvantages. Say that you really don't like big environments; you're more of a small-town girl. Teaching at a private school in a college town would make you feel more comfortable and at home.
- Maybe you discovered that your ideal day starts with you waking up at 10am. What sort of lifestyle would allow you to do that? Does that fit with your plan to become a teacher? Could you potentially hold all your lectures in the afternoon?
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Break the vision into stages. A long-term goal can seem impossibly far away or hard to reach, especially if it requires years of work. Many people give up simply because it takes too long or seems too difficult. You need a plan. For starters, break up the task into parts. This will let you focus on each part one at a time, giving you more manageable goals to work towards.^{[3]
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- To become a professor, you know that you'll have to do a bachelor's degree and then go to graduate school. What other stages will there be? How long will the whole process take? Find out.
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Create plans for each stage. You will need a plan for each and every smaller stage in your long-term goal. Don't worry that you have to formulate these plans now, all at once. Some will come later. The important thing is that you are organized, know what has to be done, and see how your daily or weekly tasks fit into the larger picture.^{[4]
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- You see a long road ahead of you in becoming a professor. Break it into smaller parts and plan! Your map might look something like this: Get bachelor's degree in English (4 years); Apply to graduate programs (0-1 years); Do a Master's degree in English literature (2 years); Apply for Ph.D. programs (0-1 years); Do a Ph.D. (3-5 years); Apply widely for teaching jobs.

Part 2

Part 2 of 3:

Following the Plan

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Practice self-discipline. One of the key traits of ambitious people is that they are able to stay focused on goals. This requires self-discipline. It means working toward your goal even though you don't always feel like working. It means hitting the books when you'd rather sit on the couch and watch television.^{[5]
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- One way to improve your discipline is to have a routine, making time for your goals every day. If you're in school, for example, treat it like a day job: every day you will either be at class or studying from 8am to 5 pm.
- Develop habits that further your goals. Wake up earlier, for instance, or, for the budding professor, read literature in your spare time.
- At the same time, nix habits that are undermining you. If you are constantly distracted by the internet, turn off your wi-fi when you need to work.
- Make the time. If urgent tasks are keeping you from your plan, make time to devote to your goals. Wake up earlier and spend an extra hour on it every day. Use your spare time on weekends or in the evenings.
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Review your goals periodically. While on the road to your long-term goals, you should periodically review where things stand. Sometimes, we find that our wants and desires change over time. Maybe you started on the path to becoming an opera singer but, after a time, found that you just don't like it as much as you once did. It might be time to rethink your goal.
- Sometimes goals need a complete reboot. Opera didn't work out. You may have to reassess what you want in life. Go back to your long-term vision and ask whether anything has changed. Reconsider your ambitions.
- At other times, our goals might only need minor tweaks. Say you took a killer class on comparative literature in college. You still want to study English, but also Spanish literature. Your overall goal is mostly the same, but you've just changed a small point of focus.
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Celebrate progress. Part of the joy of achieving your dream is in the ride. Enjoy it. Make sure to celebrate when you move a bit closer to your long-term goal. Have you graduated with a Masters' degree? Go out for a fine dinner – with champagne!^{[6]
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- Recognizing progress helps us to stay motivated, particularly when the long-term goal is a work of years or decades.
- Whether large or small, celebrating progress better allows you to stay motivated and to keep your eyes on the long-term prize.
- Some studies show that we get more motivation if we see these steps as learning opportunities rather than just as a means to our goal. When you review your progress, focus on what you've learned and how you've grown rather than just on what you've accomplished.^{[7]
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Part 3

Part 3 of 3:

Staying Motivated

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Keep focused on your goals. Focus is how we stay on task with a given object, goal, or activity for a long amount of time. Focus can be easy when it comes to short-term goal, which have a quick pay-off. For long-term goals, however, it can be harder to sustain your motivation. Try to keep your focus sharp.^{[8]
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- Practicing good work habits, reviewing goals, celebrating progress – all of these should help you to maintain your focus.
- Remind yourself of what you are doing in moments of doubt. Think about why you want to achieve your goal in the first place. Keep your long-term vision in the forefront.^{[9]
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Surround yourself with motivators. Use the people around you to advantage. Surround yourself with friends, relatives, co-workers, and peers whose option you trust and who bring out the best in you. They can provide an invaluable support network or even give you a needed critique.^{[10]
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- Ask the people that you trust for advice, if need be. Listen to them. Try to be humble enough to recognize any mistakes that they point out.
Bill Gates, Businessman & Philanthropist

Finding great mentors is key for building skills and success. "Everyone needs a coach. It doesn't matter whether you're a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player."
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Think realistically. Highly motivated people are usually realistic thinkers. That is, they understand that success might take a long time or even years. They also recognize that progress will come slowly and that, even after all of their work, there is a chance of failure.^{[11]
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- Owning that there is a chance of failure is not admitting defeat. Instead, it allows you to temper your ambitions with reasonable expectations.
- A budding professor should know that many people never reach this goal. Most never finish school. Others complete a Ph.D. to find that positions are very competitive and never land a job. Knowing this ahead of time is good – it will help you to cope in case of failure.
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Cope with failure. You will probably encounter setbacks or perhaps even small or large failures in pursuing your dream. Don't let a setback derail your carefully laid plans. Rather, learn to deal with failure in productive ways – this is another trait of highly-motivated people.
- Avoid catastrophic thinking. Someone who thinks catastrophically about failure probably does not have reasonable expectations. A failure does not close all doors. It may close some, but others are still open. In a way, coping with failure is about finding these other open doors.
- Have a backup plan. So, your plan to become an opera singer fizzled. That doesn't mean that a career in music is out for you. Perhaps you are better suited to sing in a chorus? Or, perhaps you can use your real skills in music to become a voice teacher?
- Make adjustments as necessary. Say that you planned to go to medical school. You did a pre-med degree, volunteered in hospitals, and did everything the right way. But you couldn't get into a program. You have options: you can either apply again or come up with a new plan, like going to nursing school.
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Use setbacks as ways to learn. Most of all, use your failures to grow and to continue to improve. Rather than becoming depressed about a setback, take stock of what happened. Study why you failed. Understand your failure and make sure that you do not repeat the same mistakes.^{[12]
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- Highly-motivated people are constant learners. They read, they analyze, they find new and more efficient ways of doing things. They know that growing as a person is linked to learning. Cultivate these habits.^{[13]
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- Look closely and carefully at yourself. Be honest. Why did you fail to get accepted to any of your medical school choices? Was it your B- in biology? Maybe you could have written a better admissions essay?
- Locate the possible problem and plan a solution. For example, decide to retake biology and study harder to get a better grade. Or, rewrite your admissions essay and have other people read it. Then, plan to reapply to the same programs next year.