How To Dream Big — Peter Diamandis

Let me ask you one question, dear reader. What is your MTP?

I’m talking about your massively transformative purpose. What makes you get out of bed every morning and say, ‘this is why I am alive’? What makes you go to sleep thinking, ‘I’m so excited about tomorrow’?

You may not know yet. That’s ok. But I suggest making it a goal to discover what your MTP is. When you have that kind of emotional energy, it will drive you to go bigger and bolder than ever before! Once you know which exact star you are going for, you will know what to ignore, and double down on fulfilling that purpose. With your MTP, you are able to think and go 10x bigger.

It’s not a lack of resources that often holds us back. It’s a lack of ambition. We don’t have big enough dreams to achieve that 10x mindset. There is one person that comes to mind when I think of ambition and HUGE goals.

This man is a polymath, co-founder of Singularity University, founder of Abandance360, founder of XPrize (this one is seriously cool), co-founder of Planetary Resources and Human Longevity, has been named one of the world’s greatest leaders by Fortune Magazine, and has written 2 books; Abundance — The Future Is Better Than You Think, and Bold — How To Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact The World. He also has degrees in Molecular Genetics and Aerospace Engineering from MIT and holds an M.D. from Harvard Medical School. The list can honestly go on for hours, but I think I’ve said enough for you to get the point: he is incredible.

I’m talking about Peter Diamandis. A man with multiple MTP’s in his life. And look where it got him. He is one of the most innovative, forward-looking people I know, and the philosophy is sound. It’s from him, that I learned how to dream big.

Here are 4 ways that you could dream — and achieve — bigger like Peter Diamandis

Find Your Passion

This goes hand in hand with what your goals are and leads to having persistence and grit. This is super important. Not many people know what their passion is, myself included. I know what motivates me in the short term, but I need to find my true ambition. Your ambition could be to cure a disease such as Malaria, reduce poverty rates, send humans to Mars, or even go to space.

As a child, Peter was super passionate about Star Trek and Apollo, with a goal to go to space. When he got the chance, he got out there and worked on realizing his dreams. He has several ventures in the space industry, including Planetary Resources, International Space University, Zero Gravity Corporation, Space Adventures… you get the point.

What fueled Peter to achieve all of that? It was his passion for what he was working on. When you enjoy what you are working on, it doesn’t feel like work. You’re just doing what you’re doing because you love it.

When you recognize your MTP, you will think 10x bigger, grow 10x faster, and be 10x more excited about life.

So let me ask you, what is your purpose in life?

Ask yourself — ‘What was my dream, what did I enjoy doing as a child?’. After answering that questions, ask ‘Why am I not living in that dream or doing what I wanted to do?’ It’s in asking questions like these that you work out your passion. Another very important question to ask yourself is ‘What is the one goal you want to finish today which will have the greatest positive impact in your life?’ Ask yourself that every single day.

Even when you find your passion, remember the power of compounding. The goal is to improve every day, not to become an overnight success.

Believe in the power of compounding, focus on daily improvement, and maybe one day you will become an ‘overnight success’.

Set Big Bold Goals, and Have Big Bold Ideas

Diamandis’s goal is to see the world the way it should be, and going out and doing everything he knows possible to make it happen.

“We are living in a day and age where we can make our boldest dreams come true.”

Go out there and make your dreams happen. Shia Labeouf once famously said, “Don’t let your dreams be dreams”.

That may be a joke or whatever, but if you would actually follow this advice, you would gain so much knowledge, and your life would be so much better. It’s not going to be easy at all, but nothing is going to get handed to you in life. You must create your own reality. Have huge, impactful ideas that are important to you, and it will increase the amount of productive time you have in a day.

Why am I writing this article? To get better at writing, and to learn about someone great like Peter Diamandis. I know I won’t get better at all if I don’t practice writing and publishing articles. I may not be the best right now, but with enough practice, who knows? My (small) goal is to get better at writing, so I’m working on it, and inventing the reality I want to see in myself. My end goal though, is to become world-class in many areas, and that includes writing. Nothing is handed to you, you must create your own reality.

How do you think the greatest inventions were created? Do you think some fairy came to Steve Job’s doorstep and said, “Hey look Steve, I got an offer for you” and presented him the iPhone?

Of course not! Through the tangle of neurons firing in our complex brains, Steve Jobs had an original idea. He didn’t know if it would work, and it sounded completely crazy. It was completely crazy.

Yet still, he persevered, not knowing if his idea would completely flop.

And the thing is, that most ideas do. You should not be afraid to take HUGE risks. When you are afraid, you most likely will fail. Plan for failure. Accept it when it happens. Do not be afraid to try again.

Do you think if the iPhone failed that Steve Jobs would just stop inventing? He would keep at it, no matter how many times he failed. This goes hand in hand with the next point.

Persistence Is Key

I’m talking about this guy with all of these accomplishments… to a reader, it may seem like he is an overnight success. In reality, he just had grit and was persistent in the long term. When shit hit the fan, do you think Elon Musk just dropped Tesla and SpaceX and walked away?

If someone told you, ‘it’s not going to work’ or ‘that’s a terrible idea’ but you believe in your idea, are you just going to give it up? Of course, I’m not saying to not consider why they may be saying that, but why is some person going to stop you from achieving or doing what you want to do?

Peter had fought for 10 years to have his company — Zero Gravity Corp approved. He was told no many, many times by bureaucrats in the FAA. Eventually, only when directly contacting the director of the FAA, did he get approval. He didn’t give up. He had grit. He believed in his idea, and believed in himself.

I encourage you to do the same.

Once you have your big goal/ambition, actually work towards it. ‘Just do it.’ Accept and analyze input from others, and extract the kernel of truth that would actually be productive to you. We are in a time, where anyone can come up with a bold idea and get large amounts of capital to help them pursue it. All that is required, is your ambition, persistence, and passion, and trust me, you will get very far in life.

When it gets hard, that’s when you need grit the most. Push through it. You may find that the moments where you struggle the hardest, you learn the most. But how do you find that fire in your belly to push through challenges in your path?

The most ideal way to tell what will happen in the future is by creating it yourself

You can only control your actions — and reactions. What if I told you that that applies to creating the future you want to see for yourself? Instead of just reading about artificial intelligence, and being curious (which is still super important), actually work towards changing the world in the way that you want to see it.

The future is created by our actions today. The future is dictated by the people who are crazy enough to think that they could change it.

Peter sees a future where asteroid mining is a reality. He created Planetary Resources. He sees a future where humans live a longer and healthier life. He created Human Longevity. You might see a future where cancer is cured. Don’t rely on someone else to do that for you, get out there and at hustle at it yourself.

Shape the future you want to see.

Don’t be pessimistic either. There are plenty of people that will say that the present looks bad and the future looks bleak, and everything has already been invented or innovated. People that say this, are saying it for attention, or they don’t know what they are talking about.

Sure there’s still conflict and disease, but if you look into history, the pessimism is badly placed. This is an excerpt from Peter’s blog(https://www.diamandis.com/blog/tech-vatican-remarks):

It’s hard to remember how extraordinary the world is today when we’re bombarded 24/7 by news about problems and disasters. History provides valuable context, however.

- Some 700 years ago, the Plague killed 200 million people in a single year — 40 percent of England.

- About 500 years ago, famine claimed 3 million lives in France.

- 100 years ago (in 1918) World War I claimed 16 million lives, while the flu pandemic caused 50 million deaths. All in a single year.

If these were our current headlines, we would be in shock.

We forget how much the world has progressed in the past century alone.

The per-capita income for every nation on the planet has tripled. The human lifespan has doubled. The cost of food has dropped thirty-fold. The cost of transportation hundreds of fold. The cost of communications millions of fold.

The human lifespan is another way to contextualize progress:

During the days of the caveman 100,000 years ago, the average lifespan was in the late 20’s. By age 13, humans went into puberty and began having children; by 26, those parents became grandparents. And since food was scarce in those days, the best thing you could do was “give your bits back to the environment,” so to speak, and not consume food and other resources that would otherwise have gone to your grandchildren.

- In the Middle Ages, the average human lifespan grew to 35.

- A century ago, it was the mid-40’s.

- Today, it’s around 80.

One of my missions — which I share with many of you — is to discover how we can add 20, 30 or more healthy years to our lives. How do we make 100 years old the new 60, and then intercept exponentially growing technologies to extend the healthy human lifespan beyond that?

The present is great, and the future will be even better. There is still so much innovation and invention to do in the fields of quantum computing, longevity, health, AI, and so many more emerging fields. In less than a decade, another 3 billion people will be joining the internet due to Google’s Loon project or Elon’s satellite project. Imagine how much opportunity comes with that!

If there’s anything I want you to take away from this article it’s this:

• Find your passion. Once you find your MTP, you will think 10x, grow 10x, and be 10x happier
• Dream big and execute. We are in an age where everyone has the necessary toolkit to try… so ‘Just Do It’
• Persistence is super important. Don’t give up when times are tough, and push through it
• Shape the future you want to see, don’t just sit around waiting for someone else to do it

Thanks for reading!

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