What if even the big idea is too small?
I mean, it's possible, even if it doesn't seem like it
About a year and a half ago, a mentor of mine casually told me one of my loftiest goals was far too small. I was gobsmacked. Too small? Really? It’s a pretty big goal, but… okay? I guess? I couldn’t imagine expanding it, but I like a good challenge so I set out to make myself think about it more expansively, and to tell you the truth, it was super hard work to push the boundaries of what I thought up until then was my biggest possible dream. I got out a legal pad and sketched out my big plan as I had long envisioned it, then kept pushing and pulling at the edges and inching them back, bigger and bigger until I was seriously out of ideas. But, in the middle there, it was actually kind of fun once I got it going, and a surprising number of ideas started to flow that I hadn’t considered before.
What if many of our goals are too small? Let’s work with that: imagine the largest possible version of one of your current goals or dreams, the version of it that is so big that you can’t imagine it growing beyond that point and getting any bigger even once you have definitely achieved the hell out of it. Write that down.
Once you have that sketched out, start tugging at the edges of it, nudging one little detail toward expansion then another and another until you don’t think you can possibly expand it any further (even though you probably could), then brainstorm a bit about how you might reach this new version of your goal, and each time you get stumped or hit a roadblock (funding, lack of connections, no time, whatever) think of a creative solution to get around it, the sillier or more ridiculous* the solution the better.
If you get on a roll, work backwards, too, and write about things in your life so far that have set you up to rise to this occasion and reach this big dream. Connect dots. Map it out. Have at it. The point is not that we necessarily have to aspire to the biggest and most grandest of things, but rather the point is that we challenge ourselves to interrogate where we might be thinking too small about something, to sense what we might not be missing, and see more of our full buffet of options.
* The practice of asking your brain to come up with a totally ridiculous solution to a challenge can free your brain from trying to find the right or perfect solution and gets it simply thinking of a full range of solutions. Try it. You’ll see.