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Do Something Big This Year

Scott H. Young
Mind Cafe
Published in
3 min readJan 22, 2025

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I think about my life as a series of projects. I think you should, too.

Projects exist in the middle space of our productive activities. At one end we have tasks, the myriad things that need doing in our day-to-day lives: filing taxes, walking the dog, doing laundry, submitting that report. At the other end are our grand dreams for our lives: to be financially independent, travel the world, build a business or raise successful kids.

Grand dreams are nice, but they’re generally not very practical. It’s easy to get excited as you think them over, but rarely does even the most compelling grand dream tell you what, precisely, you should be doing on Tuesday morning to make it come true. Their size and distance makes them poor objects for sustaining motivation.

Tasks and to-do lists suffer from the opposite problem. You can check off lots of tasks while accomplishing nothing major. Sure, the house is a little cleaner, maybe you’ve balanced your chequebook and fixed the wobbly chair in the dining room, but these, like most tasks, simply sustain your current life. They don’t take you somewhere new.

Projects act as the bridge between grand dreams and daily action. A big life goal often can be achieved in a project or two. And a project can be achieved through a coordinated series of tasks.

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Mind Cafe
Mind Cafe

Published in Mind Cafe

Relaxed, inspiring essays about happiness.

Scott H. Young
Scott H. Young

Written by Scott H. Young

Author of WSJ best selling book: Ultralearning www.scotthyoung.com | Twitter: @scotthyoung

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