You have the power to achieve or create anything you dream. But you are also so powerful that whatever limits you believe you have will manifest into reality. This may sound discouraging, but it’s actually good news! The limits you perceive are just that: perceived. All they are is perceptions, and nothing more. This means you can dissipate them just as easily as you formed them.
Fear-Based Thinking is Limiting
External and internal forces combine and conspire to force us to think small. We are full of fears, such as fear of failure and social rejection. We feel we lack inspiration, imagination, and confidence.
The world is filled with half-lived, meandering lives. They distort and restrict our attitudes about what life could and should be. Family members, friends, and colleagues discourage our aspiration because it may make them appear to be failures and cowards in comparison, or because they’d be more comfortable with us if we didn’t change.
Our environment overflows with distractions. Trivial and mundane minutiae threaten to overwhelm us and distract us from the substantial and significant. Society steers us toward the trifling and the frivolous because thinking big is a threat to its power and command.
All these outside forces inflict a state of mind that fosters unfocused, meager action, or—even worse—inaction. This is too bad. Thinking small will not serve the world well, and it doesn’t serve you well. Worse, it’s an insult to the gifts you’ve received. Famed Renaissance artist Michelangelo may have said it best when he wrote, “The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.”
In other words, living small is rooted in thinking small. But living big results from big. So, the higher you set your expectations, the more you’ll give to and get from life. You are unlimited!
Think Bigger
Are you thinking big enough? If not, here are two questions to get you started. Ask yourself these two questions:
- If you were guaranteed success in anything you did, what would you do?
- What is one of your goals that involves a number? Add another zero at the end of that number, and make a plan to reach it.
Here are some more tips to help you think more abundantly:
- Believe this: you were destined for greatness. This doesn’t mean you should have delusions of grandeur. Have expectations of grandeur. Don’t let reality stop you.
- Set ambitious goals and seek them with reckless abandon.
- Release beliefs that are limiting you.
- Set your goals before you evaluate what’s possible. Don’t ask if, ask how.
- Don’t just generally think big. Think big about specific significant things, such as who you are, what your purpose is, what contributions you could make to the world, and how you should live out your life. And don’t forget to translate your big thinking into big action.
- Dismiss the trivial so you’ll only strive for things that are worth pursuing.
- Exist expansively and significantly.
- Try to achieve important things that nobody else has achieved before.
- Create something that you’d be proud to leave behind as proof that you existed. Then get working on creating it. Now.