Big Dreams Can Lead To Big Disappointment


by Eric E. Smith - Date: 2007-03-27 - Word Count: 533 Share This!

When you think about the goals you have for your online business, do you think big? Do you release that new ebook with dreams of selling thousands of copies or create an affiliate program landing page with the goal of being a top-10 affiliate for that product?

That's what many in this industry will tell you to do. They will tell you to set big goals, bigger than you can ever imagine happening. They will tell you that those big goals will inspire you to even bigger success.

They're wrong.

Thinking small is the single most important thing you can do to for your business because it also inspires the single most important ingredient in online business success. It inspires action.

Thinking big is great for daydreaming, but if you set a big goal like earning $100,000 dollars from your latest information product, you're much less likely to act to achieve that goal.

Why?

For the same reason you'll lose weight a lot more quickly if you set eating smaller portions or cutting out ice cream as your goal instead of losing 30 pounds by summer as your goal. Small goals are easier to focus on and easier to devise strategies to accomplish.

Quick, think of three ways you could cut ice cream out of your diet. 1. Don't buy ice cream at the store; 2. Take another route home from work so you don't drive by Dairy Queen every day; 3. Put a "thin" picture of yourself on the freezer door to remind you why you're not eating ice cream.

Now think of three ways you could lose 30 pounds in a month...

Exercise three hours every day? Eat salads for lunch and celery for dinner? Get food poisoning?

It's so much harder to work out strategies for reaching that bigger goal than it is to work out strategies for achieving smaller goals. Strategies to reach larger goals are almost always more complex, require more effort, and require more resources in time and money to implement than the strategies to reach smaller goals.

In fact, the larger your goal the less likely you'll even start because the path to reach the goal seems so long and hard that you eventually decide not to bother or, in the case of internet marketing, you go looking for another "system" that promises an easier path to success. Even if you do manage to get started along that long hard path, the payoff seems so far away that it's easy to lose sight of the goal and you become much more likely to quit along the way.

But the path doesn't have to be long and hard!

If you break up that larger goal into hundreds or thousands of smaller goals, it's suddenly not only easier to devise strategies to reach those small goals, you also become more motivated as you move forward because you're accomplishing something tangible on a regular basis.

So, how do you do that? How do you break up those larger goals into a series of smaller goals that you might actually complete? How do you take the same effort you're putting into not accomplishing big goals and channel it through small goals that work together to achieve your online business dreams?

Here are a few ideas...


Related Tags: goal setting, business growth, taking action

Eric E. Smith is a freelance web developer, iconoclast, and dispenser of unconventional internet marketing wisdom (that means he's not selling any "Get Rich Quick" schemes). He promotes building your online business on a strong foundation through small action-oriented steps. When you're tired of all the hype and ready to discover how to take positive action to build a long-term business success, try Just a Dollar a Day

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