I'm a dreamer. The funny thing though is my dreams aren't even big fancy dreams- I never dream of owning a private jet and buying a glass tower in central new york or being on the cover of forbes and heading a company that controls billions of dollars or inventing the thing that suddenly means every poor child can drink clean water and never have to get malaria again. Basically, my dreams are what people call 'goals' and the reason for me, goals are dreams is because I'm never really willing to do the work.
This article is me. I read it and was convinced that my life had changed (lol), but it wasn't until I was telling someone off for making excuses about something they needed to do that I contextualised my behaviour. How does this behaviour play out in real life? It's like this- I want to learn French by my dream is basically having casual conversations in french to imagined people I haven't yet met, but you know what I don't really think about? The parts inbetween. Like okay how do I get from bad secondary school/ 1 20 credit course in uni french to this casual fluency I'm talking about? Well, a regular person might think- oooh i'll do duolingo 10 minutes a day for now and go from there- no but my lazy ass is like hmmm, you either fly to France and do this expensive ass immersion course (that I'm sure not willing to pay for) or, I don't know? You'll magically know french one day. *sigh*
It's like the reason so many diets don't work- you're waiting till you buy out the organic fresh food aisle of the grocery store and you don't have carbs in the house to start- meanwhile if you just gradually added in more veg or gradually took out the worst of your snacks, you will start heading somewhere- and here's the thing- cutting out soda isn't going to make you drop 100lbs- I know that, you know that- but compound interest... small things done consistently lead to bigger things done consistently and at the end of the day, consistency is super key. But for people like me, I fail because I fail to imagine that 10 minutes a day of French will do anything for me. I should be thinking, would it hurt though- would 10 minutes a day take that much from me that I'm not willing to even try???
I think dreams and goals should be the things that show you what you need to become consistent at- but then they need to be forgotten. I remember when I first started running- bruh, 12 minutes everyday- a painful 12 minutes. If you had told me I could go from that to running a half marathon, I would have just stopped and called it a day- but when I was running 12 minutes, I genuinely had no big plans- it was just the cheapest way to exercise at the time, but it was easy to be consistent and so it became more and more. And isn't that just the most obvious thing? Of course its easier to be consistent when you're running for 12 minutes vs when you're putting pressure on yourself to do "at least 45 minutes of exercise 3 times a week".
Anyway, this is honestly just a post directed solely and completely at myself- but I hope anyone who is like me would think about themselves a bit - also , this post is my 10 minutes attack on waiting for perfection- I'm not even going to proofread it, which is making my blood cold because I KNOW my punctuation was all over the place, but hey!