I Broke My Toys On Purpose

I was one of those kids who liked to take things apart to see how they worked. Over the years I destroyed a number of perfectly functioning toys. Eventually, I started paying attention to what I was doing and could sometimes reconstruct the toy to be in working condition again. My parents must have known this about me, which is why I had one of these growing up:

The Erector set was like having “100 Toys in One” according to their slogan. I remember spending hours building things, taking things apart, and doing it all over again.

In a way this has carried into adulthood. I remain ever curious about how things work and I still, every once in a while, take things apart if they aren’t working and I think I might be able to fix them.

Deconstructing Our Dreams

Our dreams are a lot like my old erector set. There are so many possibilities for what we can build, but you have to start with the pieces before you get to see the finished product. If we want to bridge the gap between dreaming our dreams and pursuing our dreams, I think we need to learn how to deconstruct them, to discover what pieces we will need, in order to put them together.

The Challenges

There are many challenges when it comes to staying productive while chasing your dreams. One of them is overwhelm, the feeling that your dream is bigger than your own abilities. Another challenge you may experience is the unknown of your dream, those aspects of your dream for which you have no experience or expertise. Fear of failure is a big one for many. You may fear that you will invest the time, money, or social interest of yourself and/or others and ultimately not realize your dream. One of the biggest challenges I deal with working through the not-so-fun parts of my dream, the monotonous things for which I have no care or energy.

If your big dream feels overwhelming, that's a good thing. It means your dream is bigger than you, & those are the only ones worth chasing. — ben toalson (@bentoalson) March 24, 2014

10 Practices for Staying Productive While Pursuing Your Dream

Dreaming big is fun, but dreaming big and not pursuing your dream is life-sucking. In order for us to remain productive in pursuing our dreams, we need to understand the nature of our dreams and how to deconstruct them in a way that allows us to build them piece by piece. Below are 10 practices for understanding, deconstructing, and rebuilding our dreams:

1. Explore Your Negative Feelings

If your big dream feels overwhelming, that’s a good thing. It means your dream is bigger than you, and those are the only ones worth chasing. Fear is a similar indicator of the “bigness” of your dream. If you are feeling these things, allow yourself to find satisfaction in your ability to dream big before you try to “fix” the negative feelings. Embrace them as a way of celebrating the bigness of your dream, then move forward.

2. Embrace the Unknowns

There will hopefully, almost certainly be aspects of your dream that require you to grow and learn new skills. As you break your dream down into projects and tasks, you may find several things you don’t yet know how to do. For that matter, there are parts of your dream that you don’t even know you don’t know. In the early stages this will help you give priority to the problems you CAN solve. The worst thing you can do is to write something off because there is a part of it you don’t yet know how to do. Get started with what you do know. The things you learn, the people you meet, or the resources you acquire along the way may hold the key to solving those unknown problems.

3. Make Failure a Part of Your Strategy

One of the most valuable things I’ve heard about failure is “When you fail, it means you get to do it again, but with experience.” We throw the word “failure” around a lot, and it can mean many different things. There are little day-to-day failures and big failures. If you can accept that at any point in your dream-pursuit things may not go as planned, you set yourself up mentally to have a proactive response to failure that makes it a useful tool instead of a potential dream killer. You may “fail” at realizing your dream as it was when you first imagined it, but that “failure” might set you on the path to a new dream that you might not have seen had you not set out in the first place.

4. Hold Your Dreams Loosely

Sometimes we get so caught up in the idea of our dreams that we don’t leave room for our dream to evolve and possibly change. When we do this, it can leave us frozen when the dream is not shaping up to our original expectations. The truth is you may not be the same person, in the same set of circumstances, with the same resources even a month from now. Don’t make it so much about the end goal, that you threaten your ability to be productive and diminish your experience of pursuing your dreams today.

5. Break it Down

If your dream is to become a published author, writing “Become a Published Author” on your to-do list probably isn’t going to lead to much action. You should definitely write your dream down, but from there, ask your dream some questions… What will it take to become an author? Probably need to write a book. What should I write a book about? Probably need to have a brainstorming session. How should I brainstorm? I like to think on whiteboards. Do I have a whiteboard? No, you should put “buy a whiteboard” on your list of things to do.

6. But, Don’t get Carried Away

You can break it down too far. Sometimes you can make yourself feel productive with the activity of breaking down your dream without actually getting anything done. Remember that the point is to get your dream to a place where there are bite sized pieces with which you can actually do something. Imagine your dream is a steak. You probably need to cut it into smaller pieces to eat it, but you wouldn’t spend all day slicing it down into tiny pieces; you want to eat that steak! Break your dream down into pieces that you can handle, but then eat it!

7. Schedule Your Tasks

One of the really practical things that has helped me immensely is to go through my list of to-do items and estimate how long it will take me to do that task. Sometimes, if I feel like I’m having trouble estimating, it means that I need to break down that item further. After having assigned time values to each item, I put them in my calendar. This helps me to see very quickly how much I can and cannot actually get done within my time constraints. As you go along, take note of how much time each task actually takes to complete… it may help you to more accurately assess similar tasks in the future. If you find that you have completed a task more quickly and have an extra 15 or 30 minutes, go back to your list and see if there are any 15 or 30 minute tasks you can knock out.

8. Group Similar Tasks

If you have more than one task that requires the same kind of action or attention (editing videos, sketching concepts, writing code, etc.) it can be helpful to schedule those together. One of the difficulties I experience in staying focused is when I have to shift mental gears between tasks that, although they serve the same project, are different types of activities. When you stay on a specific type of task for long enough, you can experience flow in your work (the sensation that you are “in the zone” or “on a roll”). But don’t just do this for the sake of doing it. If you start going cross-eyed doing the same activity over and over, it may not be a bad idea to shift gears.

9. Ask For Help

No matter where you are in your journey, there is always someone who is further down the road than you are. Some of the most successful people I know continue to seek help and valuable insight from those ahead of them. Maybe the people you look up to the most seem inaccessible, but you’d be surprised at how open they may be at sharing the things they’ve learned on their journey. Also, you don’t have to reach for people who are a mile ahead… some of the most valuable advice and experience comes from the people who are a few hundred yards down the road. For them, what you are experiencing now is still fresh in their minds.

10. Zoom Back Out From Time to Time.

A healthy interaction with a dream pursuit looks like a steady rhythm of zooming out, examining your dream, making plans, zooming in and working your plans, zooming back out, assessing where you are in your dream pursuit, recalibrating if necessary, making plans, zooming in and working your plans, etc. As you are working through tasks and to-do lists, it may be difficult to have a good sense of how much progress you are making toward your goals. Zooming out helps you gain a fresh perspective on where you are and also gives you a chance to recalibrate if you decide you want to take your dream in a different direction. Sometimes the doing of your dream shapes your dream in ways you weren’t expecting and zooming out helps you to change course if necessary.

This Week’s Challenge

For this week’s challenge I will daily write out my tasks, assign time values to them, and put them in my schedule. I hope that you find some of these practices useful and, remember, it’s not about the practices themselves, but what they are meant to accomplish. You are the builder, so don’t hesitate to tweak something to make it work for your personality and process.

Thanks again for coming along this journey with me. If you’d like to read through the other entries again, here they are:

Week 1: Productivity and Taking Care of You: An Experiment

Week 2: Resting on Purpose

Week 3: Getting Over the Reality Beat-Down and Reclaiming Our Big Dreams

As always, I’d love to hear any thoughts or insights you have to share. Feel free to leave a comment below.