Often, planning is only a pacifier
I have a bias for action. More than once in my career, I’ve taken a ready, fire, aim approach and missed my target completely. But the reason I now start before I’m ready is that for a long time, I never did anything except plan.
You have dreams — big dreams. You have stories to tell, pictures to take, places to visit, and people to meet. What are you going to do today to bring yourself closer to those dreams?
Your dreams might seem impossible. You are likely scared of your big dreams. What happens if you fail? What happens if you succeed? It feels safer to pretend like you’re doing something about your dreams.
That’s why you get trapped in endless amounts of research and planning.
Don’t say you’re going to make plans
I’m not saying that planning isn’t important, but how much planning do you need to do? Planning is just a way to make yourself feel like you’re making progress without risking anything. Planning is like the pacifier you give to a cranky baby. It simulates the sensation of a breast or bottle, but it doesn’t deliver any nutrition.
Planning often becomes a way to calm your nervous system instead of a vehicle to get you closer to your ideal life.
If you have dreams, you’ve already spent time planning and scheming. It’s time to take some action. You can figure out your next steps once you start your journey.
The truth is, no matter how great your plans are, the moment you start taking real action, you will discover the inadequacy of your plans. You cannot fully prepare for the infinite twists that the real world will throw at you.
Making your dreams come true
It doesn’t matter if you’re sixteen or sixty; the rules for making your dreams come true are the same. You have to work. Wishing and hoping won’t get you out of the tower you’re trapped in. Magic does exist, but it has peculiar sensibilities. It has a cost, and the cost of the magic that transforms dreams into reality is risking failure; it’s taking action.
You have to sacrifice something for the magic. It isn’t a passive power, but an accessory to action.
Hope is not a strategy. It’s important, but hope and planning alone will not get you to the top of the mountain. You need to engage your body and start climbing. Hope and planning can help you keep going when you hit obstacles, but alone, without action, they don’t get you anywhere.
No one will discover you until you’ve done something worth discovering
We all like to imagine getting an email from an agent or some other gatekeeper telling us they love our work and they are going to help us get what we want.
But that’s just self-indulgent day-dreaming. If all of your work is on your hard drive, if your photos are only displayed in your apartment, how is anyone going to discover you?
If you only think about your dreams, you will never be discovered because you haven’t done anything worth discovering. Waiting to be discovered is passive. Dreaming is passive.
It’s time for you to do something.
You must create what you want to be noticed for, and you have to share it with the world.
There’s only one thing to do
There are dreams, and there are DREAMS. I dream of cracking Jimmy Fallon up on The Tonight Show. But that’s not my DREAM.
I’m forty-nine, and I am maniacally focused on making a living from my poetry comics. Every day, I make some money from royalties and subscriptions. It’s not enough to live the kind of life I want, yet. When I started pursuing this dream in earnest six years ago, I was making nothing from my art. I was making my living as a copywriter, but I wanted more.
Today, I still make money from copywriting, and I still enjoy that work. But I make more from my poetry comics, and that feels amazing. I have a long way to go, but it feels much better to be on the road towards my dream than just looking up and imagining what it would be like to accomplish my dream.
I want to write things that make people feel potent emotions, not just make them want to buy something. I want to help people escape, laugh, cry, and gasp. The standard advice for writers and artists chasing dreams is to write every day.
That’s not enough. You also have to polish, publish, and pitch. You have to market your work.
Once you have a certain skill set, writing every day is pointless unless you are putting your work out into the world. You have to give people a chance to find you.
I don’t write every day. But I do market my work every day. I put myself out there every single day. I publish blog posts. I work to be active on social media. I run ads. I pitch podcasts and collaborate with other artists.
Today, one thing I’m going to do to get me one step closer to my DREAM is to publish this piece. It might be a dud. It might be a hit. One new reader might read this and decide they want to learn more about my books.
I don’t know. I can’t know. I just have to put it out and let it go. Then I will move on to taking one more step.
Often, I fail. When that happens, I take a moment to lick my wounds and assess what went wrong. That is when I take some time to plan my next steps, but not too much time. I learn best from taking action and seeing what works and what doesn’t.
What are you going to do today to get one step closer to your DREAM? And don’t you dare say you’re going to plan something for later.
Jason McBride is a poet-cartoonist and best-selling author. His most recent book is “How to Create a Life You Love.” If you enjoyed this post, you’ll love his newsletter, which features both email and physical mail, where he uses poetry, comics, and illustrated essays to explore nature, creativity, mindfulness, and living a fully human life.