As kids, we all have dreams and aspirations for what we want to do when we grow up. However, as we get older, we tend to put down our dreams to pursue “reality” - or what we perceive is reality. Those dreams we had no longer fit into what we consider realistic.

Years ago when I first started Happen To Your Career, my good friend Mark and I created an 8-Day mini-course to help people begin to figure out what they really wanted to be doing for their career and their life. We’ve now had over 25,000 people go through that mini-course. One of the exercises in that course involves declaring 3 wildly unrealistic things you want to do, be or become these could be occupations, jobs, roles, whatever you wanted, Sky’s the limit. The only rule is that it has to be wildly unrealistic.

We started getting thousands of responses emailed to us and there was something interesting that we noticed right away. They’re all big goals sure, but what else? None of them are actually impossible or unachievable.

What does this tell us? It means that the things we believe to be wildly unrealistic are only unrealistic because we believe them to be. It’s about the story that we tell ourselves.

How do people actually accomplish wildly unrealistic goals especially when you have reality standing in your way, like a full time job or obligations like kids that like to eat, or saving for their college. Or the simple fact that you have only so much energy in a single day before you pass out?

Reality.

We all have our current reality. This might come from obligations, parents, kids, work, serving on that board that you agreed to back before you realized how much time it was going to take, yes it’s for a good cause but maybe you didn’t actually think it would be an additional 20 hours a month.

Whatever your reality is. All of us have it. The question becomes: How do you accomplish career and life goals that you might consider to be wildly unrealistic when “reality” is always pressing on us?

When you set out to achieve wildly unrealistic goals you can always assume the path you follow will be the one less taken. This is, of course, also true with wildly unrealistic career changes!