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This Is How You Turn Your Dreams Into Reality

Five years ago, I stopped setting goals.

Unconventional, yes, and rather antithetical, especially now, when most people are almost three months into realising their goals.

But it’s true. I don’t set goals anymore.

In fact, I’ve gone as far as to remove the word from my life, and to refrain from using it in any professional or personal conversation.

I’m not trying to lose a certain amount of weight. I’m not trying to hit a personal record on the bench press. There is no number of books I want to read in a year, nor is there any figure I want to earn, financially.

I wake up at five-thirty in the morning to go to the gym. I spend two hours in the evening, twice a week, for rugby practice. A big chunk of my day is spent on writing, reading, preparing lesson plans and teaching young children, teens and undergraduates.

It all comes down to this—I want to read and I want to write, I want to stay fit and I want to educate. That is the point of it all.

Setting goals works well for most individuals and institutions. Companies set periodic targets to ensure financial growth. Sports teams analyse individual statistics to keep athletes accountable for their performance. Politicians outright promise reforms, policy changes and economic improvements because citizens demand them in exchange for a vote. Go ahead, set those goals.

But it’s not the approach that drives me.

I’m much more motivated by the act in itself. The act of doing the thing.

I’m motivated by the process—the little habits and practices that would eventually lead me to the goal.

A couple of months ago I wrote about my practice of writing notecards. When I come across an interesting story, idea or quote, I would jot it down on a four-by-six notecard before storing them, categorically, in a shoebox—a central repository of content and ideas for which I can refer to anytime. Some of the greatest men and women in our history have developed their own version of this practice to produce academic papers, books, speeches, businesses, and more. Likewise, my reason is to gather content to feed into this newsletter, and my other newsletter, or to supplement ideas for the lessons I teach at Gosh! Kids, the local university, or with my church ministry. These notecards are the result of an hour of daily reading and writing, and I’m happy to report that after two years of this practice, I've curated almost four thousand cards.

I have to admit it’s sort of satisfying to see the stack grow. I mean, the higher it gets, the more ideas I can use. Initially, I thought the point of this was to keep writing. But the more I did this, the more I realised the more is not what makes it merrier. In fact, I discovered that this tedious, analogue practice was transforming me from the inside out. I became the very thing I reflected upon. Little did I know that each card was a prophetic act of writing to myself: This is who I can be, this is who I want to be, this is what I must be. It's almost absurd to say these notecards have changed my life, but they did—indirectly. This is not just a routine, or a habit. It's my way of turning dreams into reality—the reality of being a better individual, husband and dad.

I suspect that for most of us, the intention behind setting goals is centred around improving some aspect of our lives. No doubt we want to achieve financial freedom. No doubt we want to be fitter, stronger, faster, or to look a certain way, physically. No doubt, as we age, we want to hit new milestones, to exhibit advancement, to wave the flag of victory when we do achieve those goals. But we’d be mistaken to think that reaching these landmarks are what truly matters, when often in reality, what keeps the dream alive is in the effort we put into the plan of making the dream come alive.

This is true for individuals, and just as true for companies.

Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, observed that many founders believe success is determined early on. This stems from conventional wisdom that businesses must focus on scale—automation over manual effort, prioritising efficiency over personal touch, expanding rapidly rather than refining slowly. While in theory, cost-cutting influences the life of a company, success, Graham says, isn’t spontaneous; it comes from deliberate, often painstaking efforts over time. Instead of chasing scalable solutions too soon, he suggests to do the opposite: focus on the unscalable—engaging directly with customers, refining products manually, and laying strong foundations before pursuing growth.

Jeff Bezos began Amazon as an online bookstore because books were easy to ship and had consistent demand, but by relentlessly focusing on improving the supply chain systems and customer experience, he was unconsciously building the foundations of the world’s biggest logistic supply chain. Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia of Airbnb, realising that the visual experience of searching for clean and beautiful looking apartments was what makes tourist pay a premium, literally went door-to-door to help hosts take better photos of their listings. And in its early days, Howard Schultz spent countless hours manually curating the design of each Starbucks store, selecting the right furniture, lighting, and music, testing out what makes and does not make an authentic Italian café experience.

For sure, these men experienced bouts of tears, moments of doubt, even the temptation to call it quits. After all, immersing in the process of doing the unscalable is demanding of your limited resources, and in the short term it may seem like a waste of time and effort. When we don’t see results immediately we automatically assume it’s not worth pursuing. But sticking around during the good and especially the bad times is the reason why this makes all the difference—the slow process brings you closer to your dreams by filtering out what you should focus on and what you should cut away, what truly matters and what does not.

It’s not that goals don’t matter—there’s nothing inherently wrong in pushing yourself to achieve a greater height. But it’s because having a fixated attention on a measured outcome or an imagined scenario can blind you to the adjustments, insights, and serendipitous opportunities that emerge along the way.

Focusing too much on a specific goal can make you rigid. It causes you to overlook better paths or blind spots that could lead to even greater success and fulfilment. It’s that in my experience, the path where your dreams become reality always has to begin from a trustworthy place—a point where you truly and wholeheartedly love what you do, that if you were to remove the incentives and rewards, you’d still do it because you believe in it.

That requires us to look beyond the goal, and to fall in love with the doing.

Achievement does not come from visualising an abstract notion of success, nor from chasing some lofty, ambitious goal. It comes from showing up, every day, good and bad, patiently engaging in the work.

“The unscalable things you have to do to get started are not merely a necessary evil,” Graham wrote, “but change the company permanently for the better. If you have to be aggressive about user acquisition when you're small, you'll probably still be aggressive when you're big.” In other words, the habits and approaches we develop early on don’t just get us through the starting phase—they shape how we operate long after we’ve found success. It sets the tone for what follows.

I particularly loved what the Australian TV personality Osher Günsberg said about the true reward of reaching our goals: “It’s not the gold medal that you hold at the end that is the prize. Who you became to hold the gold medal is the prize.” If we commit to the work itself, to learning, adapting, and showing up consistently, that process becomes part of who we are. We create the character that is capable of realising dreams.

Isn’t that more valuable than the “goal” itself? That you become a dream-achieving human being?

Success, then, isn’t something we aim at directly. It’s what comes when we focus on the right things over time. So, the attention is less so on the goal but on whether your process is right for you or not.

The “components” of your process matters, and that was what Buzz Williams, the basketball coach for Texas A&M University, was referring to when he spoke about this incredible idea of being an everyday guy: “Whatever it is that you’re trying to do, are you tough enough to do that every day? If you’re basing it on talent, well at some point in time it might prevail, but not always. And so if you remove talent, then it comes down to consistency, discipline, and how you are spending your time.”

It all boils down to this: If there are no goals, no sights to set your eyes on, what is keeping you? What is fuelling your drive? Do you have the everyday discipline to take it further?

The way I see it, goals do not necessarily evolve with you.

We change. We transition careers. We encounter circumstances out of our control. Our priorities and preferences shift with age. A goal set months or years ago may no longer align with your values and beliefs today. Then what?

Pursue another fleeting goal?

Or keep going with the habits and practices you've set yourself with?

Sure, set those goals, but it doesn’t matter what those are.

The real deal is in the doing. It’s in being obsessed with the quiet, relentless pursuit of improvement.

This is how you turn your dreams into reality.

Love it.

Protect it.

Believe in it.

And I’d guarantee your life will change.

Written by Mathieu Beth Tan​

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