The difference between our daily lives and our hopes and dreams

When I graduated from college I recall feeling a tremendous gap between where I was and where I wanted to be.  It seemed like I had all of this energy to do something great, but my opportunities were meager and I had to settle for entry-level work that left me unfulfilled.

I think many college graduates feel this way.  Some might say it is a feeling of entitlement.  Some say it is due to the misconception about what will happen once you have a college degree.   

But this gap doesn’t just appear at this point in our lives.  In fact we all feel this from time to time.  It seems like what we want and what we are currently doing are different. 

In Dr. Wayne Dyer’s book, Being in Balance – 9 Principles for Creating Habits to Match Your Desires, he says, “One of the huge imbalances in life is the disparity between your daily existence, with its routines and habits, and the dream deep within yourself of some extraordinarily satisfying way of living.”

I have certainly felt this imbalance at times.  In fact this gap always seems to be somewhat present.  Even as we work towards our goals, we will always feel some sort of disconnect between the daily routines and habits and our largest ambitions in life.

Even if we reach the highest levels of success, we still have to do some basic things in life.  For some this could be to raise your children.  It could be to remain healthy and continue to exercise and eat right.  It could be to remain vigilant to a religious belief.   

There will always be things in life that we feel we have to do regardless of whether or not it is completely aligned with our deepest motivations. 

But that doesn’t mean that we can’t start to design the routines and habits in our life to better align with the dream that is within us to do something extraordinarily satisfying in life. 

If we truly want to live the life we dream of, we have to learn how to control our routines and habits.  We have to be able to see things objectively and then systematically change so that we get closer and closer to living the life we desire. 

The systems and habits approach to improvement focuses on this step.  This doesn’t help us define our life goals or help us create new dreams.  It simply connects those higher-level strategies with the execution steps to help us succeed. 

In other words, it is about putting in place the consistent actions that need to take place to succeed. 

This will allow you to slowly change your daily routines and habits so that they align more and more with this higher vision for your life.  But what I had to learn, and many have to learn after graduating college full of ambition, is that you still have to start somewhere and that somewhere is often very far away from your ultimate goals.  But you have to do the work necessary and can’t just skip over that step.