How to Start Making Your Dreams Come True

“Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true.”

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

The journey to making your dreams come true isn’t like most journeys. No one hands you a road map, agenda, or packing list. You barely even get a compass. You have to chart your own route as you go, doubling back for every uncrossable river, taking mysterious switchback trails up the mountains, and generally getting very lost before you find yourself again.

Many parts of this long journey are filled with joy, but some are quite painful — painful enough to make you want to quit. It’s easy to feel demotivated during the painful parts. Not knowing when you will “get there” makes it that much worse.

I need to stop here and explain something to you. What everyone says is true — “getting there” doesn’t fill you with joy. “Making it” doesn’t make your life perfect. It doesn’t really change anything at all. Everyone, from movie celebrities to “celebrity” Medium writers, agree that getting everything you ever dreamed of leaves you, shockingly, feeling exactly the same as you did before.

Sometimes people offer simple explanations like hedonic adaptation for this phenomenon. I think there’s something more going on. By the time we achieve our dreams, we’re older and more mature, and I think our dreams mature with us. What seems like the end of the rainbow to a twenty-three-year-old is often laughably stupid and shallow to the same thirty-year-old.

Acknowledging this truth may feel disappointing at first. After all, what’s the point of pursuing your dreams if achieving them won’t feel all that gratifying?

First of all, no one says achieving your dreams isn’t gratifying. They just say it won’t make you happy forever. After all, the top of every mountain is the bottom of another.

Second of all, the fact that this happiness doesn’t last forever means we’re granted the privilege of pursuing many dreams. We can achieve one dream, then form and pursue another, more mature dream. You don’t have to settle for just one dream life; you can reinvent yourself as many times as you want in this life. We can string meaningful accomplishments together until we can look back on our lives, truly satisfied with how we spent them.

To live out old dreams and develop new ones is to enjoy the beautiful process of growth that is life itself.

But all of this is incomprehensible feel-good nonsense to people who are stuck not living out any of their dreams.

The path of making your dreams come true is long and unique and no one can tell you how to walk it, but if you find yourself stuck, there’s a surefire way to get unstuck.

Build Good Habits

“Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.”

― Gandhi

It doesn’t matter what your dreams are. You may not even know what they are yet. But, you can be sure they’ll require some energy, be it mental or physical. It takes energy to work toward something you hope for every day.

Good habits are the backbone of energy. They give you physical energy from good health, and they give you mental energy from dependable motivation and emotional health. The first thing for anyone getting started improving their lives is just to build some solid good habits.

The following habits are habits I recommend you build if you want to follow your dreams because they give you energy. They leave your mind and body working as well as they can, which will be crucial if you are to make it.

Get 8 Hours of Sleep

You can’t live your dreams if you don’t have the energy to live your dreams. Getting eight hours of sleep is the only real way to rest and get energy. Caffeine can trick you into staying awake, but during the crash, you always pay the price.

Eight hours of sleep also primes our brains. When we’ve gotten a full eight hours, we think more quickly, more clearly, and come up with higher-quality ideas, all of which are critical for people who are carving the path to a better life.

Aside from the critical component of giving you energy for your dreams and a sharp mind with which to pursue them, a full night’s sleep every night comes with a host of other benefits — reduced risks of heart attacks, diabetes, illness, and headaches — that you’d be a fool to pass up.

Exercise Regularly

Exercising regularly has so many health benefits that it’s difficult to list them. The most important for you right now is that like sleep, exercise gives you energy, sharpens your mind, and gives you the physical resources you need to function. Without regular exercise, your brain will work slowly, you will be frequently tired, and you will have a much harder time changing your life.

Remember, this has nothing to do with appearance. You can be thin or fat or tall or short or have three arms for all it matters. What’s important is that you regularly push your body to its limits, training your mind and body to always be energetic and improving.

There are all kinds of great ways to exercise. I visit the gym frequently and weightlift, but that’s just what works for me. Try pick-up basketball at your local Y, regular long walks, hikes, rock-climbing, whatever physical activity you think will give you a workout you enjoy.

You don’t have to track your weight, performance, or any of that crap. I don’t. If you’re tiring yourself out or making yourself sore the next day, you’re doing it right.

Wake Up Early

The reason productivity gurus are always talking about waking up early is that waking up early gives you so much productive time during the day. I’ve lived a 7 am to 9 pm lifestyle and I’ve lived a 7 pm to 9 am lifestyle, and let me tell you, the early riser lifestyle is a so much more productive one. Even scientific evidence shows that though the same amount of free time is available, people just get so much more done if the majority of their hours are early hours.

The good news is that you can become an early riser if you aren’t already. People aren’t born early risers or night owls. About half of people who consider themselves early risers say they were once night owls and retrained themselves — myself included. I speak from experience when I say becoming an early riser is easier than you think.

For double the impact, wake up early and go to the gym first thing. I became an early riser because my early morning gym habit gives me a burst of hormones in the morning that makes me productive and happy throughout the rest of the day. It’s like taking a happy pill every morning. It’s hard not to make progress when you do that.

Eat Healthy Food

The logic here is simple. If you stuff your face with fast food for every meal and finish it off with a bubbly carbonated soda with 165% of your daily recommended added sugars (Coca-Cola, everyone), it’s no surprise that you don’t feel like going to the gym or getting anything done. Nobody would feel like doing anything after loading their body with the nutritional equivalent of chemical waste.

If you want to feel like getting things done, put things in your body that will make you feel like it. Eat whole foods, foods that are recognizably foods, foods that will fill your belly with satisfaction and health instead of leaden weight and nausea.

I’m not recommending you count calories or macros. Humans have been eating for thousands of years. Your instincts are already good at identifying what’s healthy and what’s garbage — you can tell what’s garbage because it’s what you feel overwhelming cravings for. Stay away from your cravings and stick to what you know will fill you instead.

Assert Your Boundaries

Boundaries are the parameters we need to function as a healthy person. Boundaries can be emotional or physical. For instance, most people have the physical boundary “Do not hit me.” If someone tries to hit them, they will defend themselves.

Most people have emotional boundaries, too, but don’t defend them very well. People often say “No shouting around me, I don’t like shouting,” but if someone does shout around them, they don’t defend their boundary by leaving the situation, they allow the behavior (or even shout back!)

Most people are in the habit of allowing their boundaries to be crossed. When their parents guilt-trip them, they cave. When their friends harass them, they let them get their way. When their partners insult them, they don’t stand up for themselves.

People who are chasing their dreams need to assert their boundaries. It doesn’t matter how many good habits you have if your newfound time and energy are constantly being drained by people crossing your boundaries.

If you want to start making your dreams come true, a good place to start is to ask yourself “Do I have any people around me that leave me feeling drained and used?” and start asserting your boundaries with them.

How to Build Good Habits

“Change might not be fast and it isn’t always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.”

― Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit

It’s real easy for me to say “Aw snap, just wake up early and your whole life will get better!” Doing even one of the things on the above list with any consistency is a big accomplishment. How are you supposed to do all of them?

Well, you’re not. Sort of.

They say you can only focus on building one habit at a time. Only when that habit is fully installed as a habit can you move on to building the next habit. So you’re only ever working on one habit at a time. You do them all by mastering them one after the other.

How to Master One Habit

A lot of people in self-help have varying opinions about how to form habits. Most of the science behind forming habits boils down to the process Duhigg describes in The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business.

1. Identify the routine of the habit you want to form.
2. Reward yourself. Habits form because our brain gets a reward for performing them, so forming a new habit means providing a new reward.
3. Trigger the new habit. We engage in habits when we are triggered to — bars trigger most people to drink — so we need to come up with a new trigger for our new good habit.

This may be the science behind how habits form, but all of us can think back to a time when we formed good habits for ourselves and subsequently achieved something. Anyone who was a high school athlete formed a habit of exercising regularly. When you formed these young habits, did you know anything about the science of habit formation? Did you consciously decide on your reward? Probably not. Your habit formed because you found the result itself to be a reward.

My suspicion is that if you want to form a habit that lasts years and decades, you want to find a form of that habit that you find so enjoyable that you would keep doing it even if it wasn’t a good habit.

So instead of trying to engineer a good habit, I recommend a more relaxed strategy. Experiment with different variations on each habit until you find one that you enjoy and feels right for you.

That’s how I built my weightlifting routine. I didn’t read in a book one day that weightlifting was healthy and “decide” to build a weightlifting habit. I just thought to myself “I should exercise” and tagged along with different friends to do fitness stuff. I kept it light and fun. Eventually, one took me to the gym to do strength training and I liked it. When I found out that gym also had a sauna, I loved it. Scientists can tease out the psychology of my habit formation, but when it was happening, I just thought “This is a fun way to exercise.”

If you want to go to bed earlier, try a few different things. Set an alarm on your phone to remind you to get ready for bed. Form a bedtime routine to brush your teeth and meditate if you enjoy that sort of thing. You can take melatonin at the same time every night so your body decides to go to sleep for you. Some people love ASMR YouTube videos. Eventually, sooner or later, you’ll land on a routine that you enjoy and that works for you.

Perhaps you’re used to self-improvement content getting serious about habits. “Building this habit is crucial!!” They make it easy to feel ashamed of yourself if you don’t nail it in a month. I say: Don’t feel ashamed. This is a process of discovery. Sometimes people get lucky and discover something that works early on, but most people don’t. For some people, it takes a very long time. The amount of time your breakthrough takes is not an indicator that you’re doing the wrong thing.

How to Master One Habit — Again

I’m finding that as I get older, what worked for me in the past doesn’t work forever. Waking up at 5 am worked well for me in 2019, but if my alarm tried to wake me up at 5 am now I would unrepentantly dismiss that alarm forever.

We end up giving up good habits for a zillion reasons. Sometimes our bodies change and what felt good in the past doesn’t feel good anymore, and sometimes our lifestyles change such that our old triggers are gone.

Maintaining good habits despite dramatic changes to your lifestyle or environment requires mental flexibility. You need to forgive yourself when you inevitably fall off the wagon for a few weeks or months, and once you realize it’s happened, you need to dust yourself off and try again. And again, and again, and again. Like they say, the reward isn’t the destination, it’s the journey.

I know that can be hard to accept. When you have a clear destination in mind, like losing 30 lbs., it’s easy to think “No, my reward will be fitting into my old swimsuit!” And when you don’t have a clear destination, it’s easy to think “Why am I doing this, again?” Here is why you are doing this: Because the reward is knowing that regardless of how things turn out in the end, you gave yourself every chance you possibly could at living your dream life.

How to Build More Habits

The interesting thing about habits is that every good habit builds on the habits that came before it. Even if your accomplishments are only that you’re waking up every day at 8 am and taking a walk around the block, those good habits are a great foundation for building more good habits, like exercising and writing 300 words a day.

Back when I was building my first habits, each habit felt enormously difficult to adopt. Keeping my tiny living space clean felt like a huge effort for weeks. But after what felt like the millionth trip to Goodwill, keeping my space clean became second nature. Then going to the gym felt like the worst punishment someone could have devised for me — for months — but after those painful months, going to the gym became enjoyable, too. So did writing, and reading, and every other good habit I practice. Now, when I decide to adopt a new habit — like going to the gym every morning when I wake up — it is usually as easy as pie.

That’s how self-help writers end up writing these preachy articles that say things like “All you have to do is wake up at 5 am!” If you’re starting from a foundation of success, adding one more good habit feels easy. The hard part is putting that successful foundation together in the first place.

The 80/20 rule applies here, too: 80% of the pain of making your life better comes from the first 20% of the process. Keeping that in mind will make weathering that struggle much easier.

How to Actually Make Your Dreams Come True

Once you’ve got a foundation of good habits, crossing milestones will feel automatic. Seriously. It’s like setting the cruise control in a car; once you’ve set it up to go 70 mph, you know you’ll get to your destination sooner or later.

You may not know quite where you’re going at first, as we discussed earlier. You may pick up your old paints, wondering if it is your dream to paint again, or you may look at job listings, wondering if it is your dream to finally learn how to code. But if you’re making progress every day, it will soon become clear whether you need to keep painting, coding, or doing something else. As long as you’re making progress every day, you will end up exactly where you need to go.

Everyone I’ve ever met who considers themselves successful has a similar story to tell. They say they made plenty of mistakes and got lost plenty of times, but that the reason they’re successful is that no matter where they found themselves, they got up and put in the work every day. They eventually found their way.

In Conclusion

You can spend all day reading words about start making progress toward your dreams, but reading words won’t get you anywhere. What will get you there is action.

After reading this bruiser of an article, you surely already have a good idea — or at least a sneaking suspicion — about what it is you need to do next. All there is left for you to do is take action.

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