How To Follow Your Dreams Without Quitting Your Job -

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Should you follow your dreams or be realistic? It’s actually a yes and yes question because, it’s not about giving up what’s working right now and stepping into a whole lot of uncertainty. To follow your dreams means –

having a pull motivation in place to power our actions and decisions today.
And also to find that one key quality that makes that dream so special to us so that we can bring that level of satisfaction or excitement to everything we do today.

How to follow your dreams

Doing things aligned with what we truly desire creates a life free of regret no matter where we end up in life. And that’s why it is important to follow your dreams. So, let’s unpack how to make your dreams come true no matter where you are at in your life.

1. Get the map ready

It’s not reasonable to tell someone to quit their job and follow their dream of say, becoming an artist if they are struggling with their bills right now, right? Because everything has its priority and until the things with higher priority are in place, it’s not possible to give your undivided attention to something.

You know, how they say the best time to have a map is before you enter the woods. So, whatever your dream is, use Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to create your map for reaching there.

Map out what all that might come up, everything that has to be addressed and in place before you can give your all to follow your dreams.

Have a system in place. Like, have enough money saved up to cover at least six months’ expenses and any other emergencies. And you truly don’t want to be worried about having a home base, or paying your bills when you are learning something new, or planning our the best strategy to reach your goals, do you?

But even while getting these higher priority things in place you can still follow your dreams and experience that kind of satisfaction today which we are expecting some time in the future. And broadly speaking, we can do this in two ways.

First, using that goal or desire as an anchor to create a pull motivation for everything we do today.
And second, by finding the key quality.

2. Create pull motivation

We can either be motivated by –

getting away from something. Like, “I have to exercise to maintain my weight” that’s push motivation. We are pushing ourselves to get away from putting on weight. Or,
we can be motivated by moving towards something. Like, “I need to exercise to enjoy that hiking trip later this year”. That’s pull motivation – the thought of what awaits us at the end of this pulling us towards it.

And which one do you think would be easier – someone pushing you going uphill or someone pulling you smoothly up?

When you follow your dreams., when all our actions and decisions today follow that map created using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, everything we do has a pull motivation.

So, use the Cartesian coordinate system to program your decisions for pull motivation.

It’s essentially about answering four questions to check how exactly that action, no matter how big or small, fits in with what we truly want in life. See its importance in the grand plan of things.

And so, it’s about what can you do now to make your dreams come true. And using that clarity to create intrinsic motivation – a pull motivation that helps us through all the challenges and setbacks that pop up from time to time.