I don't think you dream big enough

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Happy Sunday and HAPPY JUNE! 😯 Wake up - it’s the first of the month! (iykyk)

It’s a beautiful day here in Jamaica, and this morning my run club joined a local gym for a 5K, which has me so grateful for the ability to build community and bring people together through fitness and wellness.

This past month was also a big month for a lot of people because it was graduation season, which means the end of one chapter and the start of another — my own little brother included. Although the commencement ceremonies are long, I enjoy the atmosphere being surrounded by people about to step into their next chapter of life because it forces them to be reflective.

As a very reflective person myself, listening to speakers and hearing people’s plans for their lives post-college is inspiring because you can tell that they’re delving into an unknown which is scary but also exciting.

Even the graduation Instagram posts that I see are inspiring, because oftentimes the captions are filled with gratitude from the graduates sharing their growth between the years that they were in college, from when they started to where they are now.

What’s on your map?

Speaking of Instagram captions, I read one the other day in which a graduate thanked her university for turning the little dots and shapes on the world map into countries because of the diverse people that she met from all over the world, from countries she had never even heard of.

You know me, when I like something - I write it down.

And you better bet I wrote that down. ✍️ 

For me, though, what stood out wasn’t just that being in a community of people from all over the world was important to her, but more so the fact that she called the map little dots and shapes.

When I thought about that, I recognized two things:
1. My world geography could use some work 😅 
2. There’s still a bunch of little dots and shapes on my world map 🤔 

By #2 I mean that there’s a bunch of places in the world that I don’t know anything about. They’re really and truly just shapes on a map, probably with names I can’t pronounce, and it’s so cool that there’s whole communities of people that live there with cultures that I haven’t experienced that are completely different from my own.

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This isn’t only about the world map…

I saw a statistic yesterday that was a little jarring:

2-4% of the GLOBAL population flies INTERNATIONALLY each year.

Of course I know that travelling is an incredible privilege, but that percentage was a bit shocking, because that means that 96% of the world won’t leave their home country in a given year, and about 80% of the world has never flown — which doesn’t mean they haven’t travelled internationally but it does mean they have never gone from one hemisphere to the other, which is where you would find that stark difference in cultures.

For me, it put into perspective the reality that if for me — someone who has travelled quite a bit in my short time on earth — there are still so many little dots and shapes, for the average person on the globe, there must be so many more dots and shapes on the map!

But as I said above, this isn’t just about the map. 

This is also about opportunities, knowing what you’re capable of as a human and pushing the real upper limit of your human experience.

Most people don’t know how to set a goal that’s truly ambitious, because their ambition may be limited by what’s on their ‘map’.

Expand your ‘map’ and elevate your ambitions

When I started putting together my list of 300 before 30 that I love to talk about, the idea was to list a bunch of things that I wanted to do before I turned 30, some being outlandish or hard to achieve.

I still haven’t even listed 300 things on the list (I have about 170), but most of my list consists of visiting new countries and having new experiences.

However, a lesson that I learnt from compiling that list is that it’s hard to dream big when you don’t know how big your dreams can really get. 

Read that again.

What do I mean?

When I put together the list a few years ago, one of my goals was to reach 10,000 followers on TikTok so that I could monetise. Meaning, I wanted to reach 10,000 followers by the time I turned 30 years old.

I’m 24, and there’s over 42,000 followers on my TikTok. So now I have to push that goal post.

As another example - one of my goals was to get my PADI Open Water Scuba Diving Certification by the time I turned 30. I didn’t know anything about scuba diving, and after getting certified I realized it was something I loved and so I subsequently spent a month in Honduras and became a PADI Divemaster.

With our limited knowledge of the world, it’s hard to dream big. We can only dream within the little dots and shapes that we know on the map.

How can you dream to go to Tuvalu if you didn’t even know it existed?

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Conclusion

As humans, we will always be limited. Whether it’s limited by geography, by our ability to move, by our own knowledge about a certain topic or by other constraints like family, money or whatever it may be —

— the reality is that we’ll always be limited by something.

However, as an exercise for my own personal growth, one of the things I’ve made a habit out of is pushing those limits.

Recognize where there’s a little dot or shape on your map, and do some research. Explore what can be pursued and accomplished in this life, and learn more about things that you’re curious about.

When the adults told you to dream big as a kid, they didn’t realize that how big you can dream is a direct consequence of what you’ve experienced.

They didn’t realize that in order for you to want something, you have to know it exists. 

So dream big. Unlock new places on your own world map, and explore the opportunities that you’re curious about so you can set your goals as big as they can get. Don’t become complacent with your limits.

You can always push them even a little bit further.

Until next Sunday,

Justin