Breaking Up Your Dreams Into Micro-Dreams

It is true that we are encouraged to have some really big dreams and aspirations, which can also create the enthusiasm within us to put in our best. However, in some cases, this can actually be counterproductive because the dream may be so big that it can even discourage actions. What you need to do to keep your motivation alive is to break up the dream into little bits. In that way, you will be able to pursue them one after the other and it will be easier than taking it as a single whole - this is the idea of micro-dreams.

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A few years back, during one of the vacation periods when I was in school, I wanted to learn a particular tech skill. It was a very good skill and I had always wanted to learn it. I had about 3 months vacation period, so I had to fit the schedule into it. However, due to the complexity of the skill, I started losing the motivation to do it. In fact, for almost 2 weeks, I did not proceed with it as it became discouraging. To make it even worse, a friend of mine came telling me how complicated it was, and how he has been in it for up to 8 months without finishing. At that point, even though I had a dream about acquiring the skill, it was almost being discouraging.

After about 2 weeks of inactivity and docility, I decided to take a step towards the dream. What I did, after I got some ideas from my mentor, was to break the task into little bits of modules, then I can take the modules one after the other. At that point, I had about 2 and half months (which was roughly about 10 weeks) before resumption, so I had to break the task into 10 modules and took them one module per week. Adorably, by the time the 2 and half months were over, I had already completed the course and was very happy with the new skill that I learnt. If I had not broken it down to micro-dreams, I may not have been able to undertake the task and time would have passed while still being inactive.

If the dream that you want to achieve looks too big for you to take on, you do not have to be too quick to change the dream, just try to break it up into tiny pieces. The truth is that, there is a kind of encouragement and motivation that can be triggered within you when you have undertaken the first micro-dream and succeeds at it, it will give you the zeal to pursue the rest of the tasks. Remember that the idea is to ultimately fulfill the dream, but the format and methods you will use to achieve it is entirely up to you. You have the responsibility to create your own motivation to keep you going.

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When you learn to break tasks into small bits, you will discover that you can achieve your goals and even surpass it. When we were in Primary School, we learnt and memorized the multiplication table, so that it will be easy for us to solve mathematical problems. When we started, we went through the 2× table, then as we mastered it, we progressed to 3×. This was how we kept progressing. The idea was to learn the multiplication table up to 12×, but we had to break it down and started from the basics. By mastering the first one, we got the motivation to proceed further. If we had been forced to start from 12×, we may have been demotivated and may not have learnt anyone.

In life, it is not the dream you have that counts, but the actualization of it. You may have a dream to become an astronaut for example, but you have to start somewhere - probably starting from an aerospace academy (like NASA). Your dreams will not fall on your laps, but you have to put works into it for it to be fulfilled. You do not have to wait until you are able to start big; just start from the basics and from where you are, then you will be surprised what you can achieve with time. Always have in mind that it takes the first step to start a journey of a thousand miles, and each step will keep getting you closer to accomplishing it.

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