4 Dreams in 6-12 Months

Good Advice, Bad Jargon from the Author of The 4-hour Workweek

Timothy Ferriss - making up words, making people jealous.

I don’t like some words. They feel embarrassing when you say them out loud – dietary supplement, self-help, interfacing, mingle. I can’t say or even write these words without cringing. Dreamlining is one of them.

It shouldn’t be legal to take any two words and slam them together…

Dreamlining, which I will henceforth refer to as DL, is a concept in Timothy Ferriss’s The 4-hour Workweek. DL has gotten a lot of tread on the internets and it is not because of the cool name.

Obviously, as you can infer from the two original words which were so rudely stuck together, DL is about putting a timeline to your dreams. Carpe diem plays a big part here, the recommendation being either a six-month or one-year timeline.

DL is also about putting a dollar sign on your dreams.

By doing a little math, you can bring that dream out of fantasy land, chop it up into little chunks, and start working on it today. The big idea with DL is that anyone can sit down, with minimal research and figure out what their wildest dreams will cost, and what it will take to make them come true, starting right now.

The coolest thing, I think, is breaking down the cost of your dreams to the daily level. But that comes at the end. First, you have to figure out what your dreams are.

This part should be easy.

It isn’t.

What do you want out of life? Imagine, you can have anything, be anything, or do anything. What would you choose? What do you get when you cross an elephant and a rhino?

For most people I know, the answer to these questions is the same: Hell if I know (Elephino). I spent most of my life having vague ideas about what I didn’t want, but knowing next to nothing about what I did want. In fact, one of Dreaming Right’s big questions is “How does one figure out what to want?”.

Ferriss says, in a nutshell, “just do it.” His approach is more about going with your gut than rationally analyzing your values. He asks that you imagine that you cannot fail, and you are 10 times smarter than the rest of the world. Easy, right? Now, list 5 things you dream of having, doing, and being.

If this is still incredibly hard, Ferriss has a few other suggestions:

• What would you do, day to day, if you had $100 million in the bank?
• What would make you most excited to wake up in the morning to another day?
• Still stuck? – then list:
  • 1 place to visit,
  • 1 thing to do before you die,
  • 1 thing to do daily,
  • 1 thing to do weekly,
  • 1 thing you’ve always wanted to learn.

If you are like me, you can easily think of 5 things you want, and almost as easily, you come up with things to do, but when you have to decide what you want to be you

What may make deciding what you want to be even easier is the next step: convert each being into a doing. That is, determine what action would mean that you had become what you set out to be. “Being brave” becomes “give a speech in front of 100 or more people.” “Fluent in Spanish” becomes “carry on a 10 minute conversation with a native speaker.”

The next step is to pick the four dreams “that would change it all”. That’s it.

When I asked my girlfriend how to describe this step, she said, “Yippee!” I think this is the approach that you should take through every step of DL.

Choosing your top four dreams from a list is not merely a mental game that is fun to play. It is a real decision to manifest a better life. This will feel exciting. Let it.

The Ubiquitous Next Action

What now? No. Really. What now?

That’s the next step. Figure out what you can do right now to start working towards your dreams. Often this step is brainstorming or researching. For example, if you plan to do a solo sailing trip to Bermuda, your next step might be to find articles on blue-water sailing. For becoming fluent in Spanish, I choose to read about the best learning techniques as my next action.

Nothing will happen without the next action.

Ferriss goes further and suggests that you write down three steps, for now, tomorrow, and the next day, all to be completed before 11 in the morning, and all to be completed in under five minutes. (Or, you can be like me and make progress in fits and starts).

Dream Accounting

It is surprisingly easy to calculate the exact cost of your dreams.

First, you have to determine your monthly expenses. If this step intimidates you, Ferriss has a DL spreadsheet and calculators that automatically do the arithmetic for you. Alternatively, just add up the past 4 months of expenses and divide by 4 to determine your average expenses.

Then, multiply that number by 1.3. This is for savings and any expensive surprises that life tends to throw your way.

The final step is to determine the costs of the four dreams you picked, divide by 6 or 12, depending on your timeline, to calculate the TMI or Target Monthly income. I have a feeling your dreams are much less expensive than you imagined.

Big Questions: What is my purpose?, creating habits, how to make a decision, meeting goals