Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

The dreams trap
As I drove my youngest daughter, Lydia, home from soccer practice today, we talked about her love of writing. She spoke of a project she's toyed with for a while, but never felt it paid to try: resurrecting the family newspaper she and her sister ran while all the kids were little.

She complained that she's the last to find out what's happening with her brother and sisters out on their own, and with both other brothers leaving this fall, it seemed like a good way to keep in touch with everyone.

I encouraged her to do it and she got excited thinking about what it could be. By the time we got home, her ideas had grown from just brothers and sisters to also include two of her aunts. And by the time she told her plans to her mom, they had grown into also contacting all five aunts and uncles and all 21 cousins and asking them all to submit regular reports for this greatly expanded family paper.

At that point I saw it happening: the dream trap was threatening to strangle her plans before she ever got started. I've seen the dream trap strangle many projects I wanted to start and I've seen it strangle the business plans of many people who wanted to start a business of their own on the Web.

The dream trap is when you start with a simple, do-able idea and then let it get away from you until it grows so big that it becomes too intimidating to do. One Stop Web Support was itself almost a victim of the Dream Trap. Having experienced success creating profitable websites for clients moving out onto the Web for the first time, I decided to offer my skills to others who were in the same position.

But the idea quickly became gargantuan as I decided I would offer every possible web marketing service that new business owners could conceivably need—design, copywriting, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, public relations, webmastering, reciprocal link brokering, newsletter publishing, and anything else they would possibly need. And I was going to do all this for multiple clients all by myself. I, one person, would fill every possible need of five, ten, twenty clients.

It was a beautiful dream. But considering that I was totally swamped trying to do all that for just one client, it was totally unrealistic. And with a goal that ambitious, it quickly became evident that it was too big of a dream to accomplish. So with domain name and web hosting bought and paid for, One Stop Web Support became one of the many perpetually "under construction" websites on the Internet for a couple of years.

I revised my plans eventually to a more realistic vision of writing tips and reviewing tools that people starting their business on the Web could read and put into practice on their own. And the site has grown steadily toward that more modest goal.

But the key is that the dreams no longer are a huge, but distant destination that is too big to accomplish. The dreams now rest in the journey itself. The fact that I am not at my grand and glorious destination (and yes, I still have a pretty ambitious one, even though the focus has changed), does not mean that the dream is out of reach. Because taking the steps along the way are as important to the dreams as the destination is—perhaps even moreso.

The dreams trap leads us to focus all our attention on visualizing an ever more delightful destination and robs us of the energy we need to visualize what steps we need to take to get there.

Don't be afraid to dream big, but don't let your dreams stop at just dreaming. Act big, too, in working out the steps it takes to get where you want to go.
Jeff