Your Big Dreams Need A Big Plan: Adulting Your Dream From Vague to Visible

n this episode, I share the real story behind finally pressing record while traveling through Laos and Asia — from timid first takes to slowly finding my voice after filming five cafés in a single day. But the bigger breakthrough didn’t happen in front of the camera. It happened when I came home and faced the overwhelm of not knowing what to do next.

That’s when I realized: action gets you started, but structure keeps you going.

We talk about perfection paralysis, the hidden cost of “winging it,” and why planning — something I used to resist — might be the missing link between your goals and your results.

If there’s something you’ve been sitting on for years… something you say you’re going to do “someday”… this episode is your invitation to stop wishing and start building.

Because you are worthy of your wildest goals — but they deserve more than hope.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Most people spend their entire life transfer than ever given a single thought. And so what it is they really want, and what's important. Can I make you yourself and the life that you have meant to live? I completely have a couple of jobs, and I hate it. It's not completely map. What's going on, guys? We are back, and today I want to talk to you about plans. So if you are serious about your big dreams, then you must also be serious about your big plans. And I'm going to go over three big ideas around planning what it is that you want to achieve. So this way you can get to the end result, you can achieve that dream and feel good about doing it, versus the opposite when you were going after a dream without any plan and you kind of stumble, and at the result, you don't get the fulfillment, you don't get the enjoyment, and the entire process becomes stressful. So in this episode here, I'm going to share a story about one of my newest endeavors is creating a YouTube channel where I share my coffee journeys around the world. And my intention behind that was to let that feed my coffee business. So this way sales would feed off of my travel channel. And then I would just, you know, I get to travel the world, create good coffee, and life is dandy. But things aren't always going to go as planned if you don't have a plan. So I'm going to share three big ideas and how I am progressing forward with this. So this way you can take them into your own life and make big gains towards your dreams. So the first step here, or the first big idea, is that action will get you started, plans will help you finish. I was in Lao the month of November. I was traveling around Laos, and my intention to go to Laos was to find authentic Laoshan coffee. So while I was there, I was started in Luamprubang and was walking around. If you've ever been to Luamprabang, there's this river that's a little bit further out from the Poros Path. And along that river, there is just a plethora of cafes, all of which roast their own coffees in-house, which is quite amazing. I'd never been to a place where all the places, all the cafes were roasting in-house and brewing it. Um, so that alone was very, very unique. And I remember when I took out my camera and I started doing my filming, I was very, uh, I was very uh, I guess, apprehensive and shy. I was going there and I would make the videos, and it was very um uh timid in when I was doing the recordings, and I wasn't very uh being very forward uh in just kind of demanding that presence. And then when I was even doing my first review, I recall just kind of sitting there in my chair and speaking very quietly into the microphones. This way, no one around me, all the people wouldn't hear me, and and you know, I could then they wouldn't think ill of me. And so there was a point during that though, during the second cafe, where I as I finished the first one, I went to the second one and I realized that this was kind of silly, right? This is silly. Um here I am doing videos here, and then at the second cafe, someone had asked me to say, Hey, what are you doing? I'm like, Oh, I'm making uh coffee videos for YouTube on my on my travels, and this one is on Laos and Coffee. And uh, so the guy took my channel and he was like, Oh, can you can you share the channel with me? So I gave him my channel, and at that point it became validated. At that point, I was like, all right, wow, I just got this feels like I just received permission to start to go towards my my dream of creating this YouTube channel. And so I for the rest of the trip, I started to just get into uh the the uh the frame of mind, or I should say in the persona of being that in which I wanted to become. And I finished that and throughout the um, I did that through in through Laos and then into Sri Lanka. So now I'm back home and now it's time to edit those videos. And when it came down to editing, there's when you have a big goal and you don't really have a solid plan on how to achieve that goal, what happens? You start to delay, and that delay leads to self-doubt. So I was creating the video and I came back, I had all this momentum. And then all of a sudden, when it came down to doing the videos, I was like, all right, when am I gonna do the time? I gotta learn this, I gotta learn the software, I have to edit this video, and then I started to get into perfection paralysis. What I'm really trying to tell you is that I didn't have a plan, right? The the plan was something that just felt like work. My mindset was that you know what, I could why plan? Because I could just get it done faster if I just go out and do the damn thing. I don't need to sit down and write a plan. But by not writing the plan, what it was doing was just causing me to spin my wheels, to cause me to go in confusion because there was no steps in terms of how to move towards the dream or what to do. Knowing that I needed to change how I approached my year, I attended a workshop on how to create a plan. And in that, I came away with the second distinction was that plans do not have to be, you know, the plans could be enjoyable. You can enjoy doing the plans. So I was I was looking at the doing the plan for this launch of my my YouTube channel and the and the my travel videos. I realized that by creating a plan, and I hadn't even gone work through the entire plan, I was literally just in the beginning looking at the competitive analysis. When I was looking at the competitive analysis, I realized that there were approaches that I could be using and kind of getting inspiration from that would help me make a better video. But I wasn't, because I hadn't planned in the past, like the previous videos I had done, I just kind of winged it. And that's how I was going through a lot of life, to be quite honest with you. And in many cases, that worked. But sometimes when you wing it, you may get the result, but you may be missing out on even better result that would have been possible had you just put the time in to plan. And then the other reality check that I got when I was doing this was my intention, as I had mentioned previously, that my intention behind doing the YouTube channel was I wanted to come on, uh do the YouTube channel, and I wanted to have the YouTube channel fuel my coffee company. So fuel the sales of my roasted coffee. So this way I could then have someone produce the coffee for me, of course, in integrity, right? Using my formula, my recipe, everything else, hiring somebody to do that, and then going out and being able to travel the world, come back in, say hello, everybody, go back out, and then you know, but spreading the inspiration is part of my mission, is just to inspire people to go out and live their one life. And the only way to for me to do that is by doing it myself. So back home, and I'm looking at this plan, and I'm like, all right, oh gosh, it just seems so stressful to try to put the thought into it because I'm like, well, what if I do it wrong? Right? Like, there's there's so many steps here. So just because it required me to look at so many different facets, I avoided it. But as I was taking this workshop and I started looking at the going through the plan and looking at the steps and just kind of break starting to break it apart a little bit, I realized that there was not a freaking chance in hell I was ever going to achieve that dream because I had no clarity one on what that target was to what it was going to be required to get there. Think about this, right? Say you have a revenue goal of say $500,000, and you want to do that all with coffee sales where you have a small, smaller margin, and uh people usually get one bag at a time, right? How many sales do you have to make in a given month? A lot. So it made me rethink things like a value ladder, like what are the other services that I can offer, such as an experience abroad, where I take people with me on some of my journeys, say to Italy, to Korea, or even to um places like Indonesia, where I had some of the most unique coffies I'd ever tasted in my life. And then all of a sudden, now the the picture started to change. All of a sudden now things started to become in focus. And I saw, well, wow, if I mix this with this, all of a sudden the the revenue goal that have becomes possible. But without the without the the plan, without looking at that, there was no, I didn't know. I would have been spinning my wheels trying to achieve this desire or this this revenue goal. And when I couldn't do it, I would just fizzle out and think there was something wrong with me when there was nothing. There was something wrong with the goal and the reality of uh, I should say, the the economics of it. So it's really uh easy to say, well, all right, well, that's easy for you to say, right? I have no time. Like I have no time to sit there and plan. I have so many people relying on me, I have to get going. You may say that, and that's a very valid argument. And but flip that around in its head when you're not planning, when you're just going after it, first of all, think of how it is that you show up. Like, do you show up as your best self? Do you perform your best? Are you literally just reacting the entire time? And then secondly, if you don't have there's that that saying that says if you plan to if you don't have a plan, then you plan to fail, or no plan, or something along the lines. I don't remember what the quote is. But for planning is the first step. A little other side story is many of the trips I'd have, most of my trips I've pretty much winged, right? There are those where I was like, you know what, I'm booking this trip, I'm going. And as a result of booking those trips, I arrive at the destination and I'm like, okay, I'm here. Now what? I didn't plan anything. So as a result, I wasted so much time in that destination because there was no plan. This is a very, very simple, simple uh example of this. But then there was also those trips where I said, okay, uh, I have this amount of time and I am gonna do this, this, and this. I have to be here by this point, here, by this date, here by this day. And I crammed everything in. And as a result of cramming that stuff in, I had an ex made as an experience while I'm trying to leave, you know, like some room for uh for the unexpected, but also just making sure that everything that I desire, like the target, the objective that I set at the beginning of even booking the trip, the reason why I'm doing it, that I'm achieving all of those points. So back to the Laushan trip. So there was a point that the most beautiful point was when I was sitting at that cafe. And towards the end of my trip, like I as I was doing this, I started to get into that persona. I started filming these coffee shops. I was going in, had no problem asking them, say, you know, mind if I get behind the counter and take these photos. I started to get more comfortable. And what I realized was that I did not need permission. I didn't need anybody to tell me, okay, you're good for YouTube or wow, good video. I just had to give myself that permission. And so I want you to come away with like a couple tattoos that you can get on your brain or on your arm or anywhere you want to put them. First is get in motion. It's easy to sit there on the sideline and come up with these plans, but nothing is ever gonna happen unless you are in motion. Once you're in motion, then new insights are gonna come. And that plan that you just spent all that time created may change, but that's okay. Or you can look at the flip side. Or you can look at and say, you know what, there are too many unknowns. There's no way for me to know what the path is, how to plan this, because I've never done it and I'm looking online and I can't find anyone who's done it. How can I possibly do that? You write down what you can, what you know, and then you take action on that and trust, and not trust, that the clarity is going to come from you being in motion, you taking the action. And then let's think of the benefits of this. And I this is actually something that I had lie, I was laying awake in my bed a couple of nights ago. I've been having this restless sleep, tug having this like tug of war and versus what I want from my life, and and uh not sure how to get it. And so as a result, since the beginning of this year, I've been I put the forks in the into the ground. I said, you know what, I am just gonna focus on getting clarity and in designing my life going forward very, very consciously. So I was laying inwake, it was probably like three o'clock in the morning for some reason. I you always hear that metaphor. People say, What's the thing that keeps you up at three o'clock in the morning? And no lie, three o'clock in the morning, I had been waking up like repeatedly, same time. And so I was sitting there and I was thinking about the cost of not planning, the cost of not pursuing my dreams, the cost of sitting on the sidelines and and not taking the actions needed. And the cost was when I thought about, and like, you know, I had said this before, and I'd be like, oh, well, you know, I can create these beautiful experiences from for my family. And but this was a for the first time I'd actually sat there and I was visualizing it. I was imagining myself, like, if I had the resources to give the people what like my my loved ones, what I wanted to, and then the the lack thereof, and then it just it left me feeling very uncomfortable. Like, you know what, I need to take some action on that right now. But but here's the beautiful part again, is that you get to make a new choice right now. You get to decide what your reality is gonna be going forward. And while it may take some time, there might be some lag time, you get to decide how you're gonna move forward because each day is a new day, and each action you take is creating a new reality for you. So, really quickly, I want you to take out your actually just think about this for a second. Think about a time where you had a plan and you were so detailed on the plan, and then you took the action. What was the outcome of that plan and how did you feel during the entire experience? Next question is think of a time where you went into something without any plan. You didn't have a plan, you went into it thinking that you were gonna figure it out and everything was gonna turn out, and how did that go? And if you got the result you wanted, was the process pleasurable? I am pretty confident saying, with the exception of some, you know, some rare circumstances, with for most of the things that uh we we value, the lack of planning often leads to frustration, leads to anxiety, leads to uh lack of clarity and lack of achieving that goal. So for homework, I want you to think of one thing that you want to accomplish. Like think of that dream that you have. Pick one dream, one big dream. And I want you to know how would you know if you achieved that dream? The first thing in anything, any goal that you set is understanding what is success. Like, how do you know if you've gotten the thing that you say you wanted? And what is that specifically? And then this second step, and this will get you the momentum, this will at least get your mind cranking and thinking about how to move forward and knowing that there is a path forward, is to go out there in the world, YouTube, wherever you are, and look for someone doing what you want to do or something very similar to it. And then just see what is their process. Like, how do they structure? Say, for me, it was YouTube, right? So, how does this person structure his YouTube videos when he when he starts, right? What's his hook at the beginning? What kind of shots is he taking? How much time is he spending on each clip in his B-roll and looking at all these things? And all of a sudden, as a result of doing that, you start to get more clarity. And as a result of getting that clarity, you you've already taken the action because you've done some of that research. Now you start to build some confidence in momentum that you have a process, a system that you could apply to that to start to get the same result. So I hope this helps you in some way uh just to start to realize that your dreams are closer than you think, and that if anything that is worthwhile, anything that is of value is going to require you to do some planning. If you're in your head, you're dead. And uh that is it for you. I that's all I've got for you guys today. This was been one of the uh the biggest learning lessons in my life right now, because uh, as I had mentioned before, I I'd always just kind of winged everything. And while I I would have some generic plan, it was never that very crystal clear. Oh, sometimes the image was crystal clear, but for the bigger goals, the things that had more complexity, I was very, very vague. And as a result, I was burning out and I was thinking that there was something wrong with me. Right? I was afraid of judgment, and then their internal critic would take over. So I want you to get the confidence to start to move towards your dreams because as I mentioned, every single moment is a blessing. You deserve to live the life that you imagined and that you are being called to live. So I hope that this helps you. Uh, if it did, please leave a comment there. As always, guys, thank you so so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Remember, you only get one life live fully, live passionately, and most of all, live now. God bless you guys, and I will see you again soon.