Last year a good friend of mine brought me a jigsaw puzzle with the words Dream Big surrounded by illustrations of the sorts of dreams people have. The completed image looked totally awesome but as a jigsaw I thought to myself what the heck! One, it was a thousand pieces, so when was I going to find the time to do it, two, as cool as it looked what would people think? It’s a jigsaw, last time I saw one of these it was the central point of socialization at my grandmother’s retirement village.
As months passed and dust began to collect on the box, I was becoming pretty aware that I wasn’t embracing the opportunity for silly reasons; reasons that have seen so many other visions collect dust and eventually die. This wasn’t about completing the puzzle but making dreams real and I became more and more eager to piece it all together.
- The first step was getting started, opening the box and flipping over all the pieces so that I could see as much as I could, and then all I needed was to see how two pieces could fit together, then three, then four….
- The second step was setting aside some time to get it done. When I looked at time I thought to myself if Richard Branson can work out how to send people to space, I can totally find the time to achieve this puzzle.
- The third and final step involved focus, commitment, and looking at the pieces from different perspectives to see how they could fit together.
Piece by piece it slowly connected together to create the image that had been in my mind from the very beginning.
Everyday there are images in our mind of things we want to achieve that make life a lot like a jigaw.
Whether we’re baking a cake, doing an assignment, in sales, running marathons, taking New Zealand innovation and creativity to the world…, whatever the big dream may be we need not to worry about how it will piece together but trust that if we can see it, we can achieve it.
Too often motivation dies, dreams choke on the dust and eventually they die to. They choke because of the uncertainty of the journey; how does it all fit together? Do I have the time? What may people think?
But we can stay motivated and our dreams dust free if we believe all the pieces we need are in front of us, we just need to get started, join the obvious pieces, be focused and committed but most importantly when we get stuck, when it looks impossible look at what is in front of us from a different perspective, a different angle and eventually (just like my jig-saw) all the pieces will fit.
Game on!
