Hope vs. Action: Unleash Your Potential with a 4-Step Life Plan

Hope is for losers. Try doing.

I was born in a poor village in the East of Romania, where nobody knew anything about the world outside.

We knew everything about everyone in the village. But we ignored there was a better way of living. And, in some ways, for many people, that was ok.

So when I was a child, I learned to work with cattle and hope. When you are poor, you have nothing else to work with. While helping my family in the fields, I hoped for a healthy life. I hoped I would get good grades in school. And I hoped my life would have improved somehow. But it never did.

My parents waited for a change for many years, and it never came. I had no power to change the outcomes of my family yet. But then, my father left the village to find a better place for us. And that was the first time I saw a change in my life. Luckily, for the best.

Hope is for losers.

The action moves everything, and hope is for losers – that’s what I learned from my youth.

If not for my father, I might have never had the opportunity to write online and build a side hustle. I may have never discovered the Internet as I know it today. And maybe, I would have never learned English.

If he hadn’t taken action, we would still be there – hoping to reach the end of the month however we could. But he didn’t give up. He took action and changed his destiny, and ours too. And for that, I will always be grateful.

When I return to my hometown and meet my old friends, they hope things will improve. They expect things will change now that they have more possibilities than ever. But they don’t do anything. And it pains me to know they will never change.

So today, I am sure hope is for losers. And if you base your future on your hopes, you will never get anything done. But how can you escape from this mental trap?

Well, you have to start doing something.

How To Change Your Life by Taking Action

How do you start doing something?

It might seem like a stupid question, but it can be challenging when you don’t know where to start.

You often know where you want to go but don’t know how to get there. Other times, you don’t even know your purpose. So you must go through some preparatory steps before you find your path. But with this 4-step life plan, you will find an answer and change your life by taking action.

1 – Find a purpose.

Finding a purpose is the easiest task when hoping for something to happen. And if you do, your motivation gains the traction of the final goal. So you will start doing things with more ease.

But searching for purpose is challenging. Anybody could find useless goals that last for a few days. Yet only life-long purposes have the power to push you forwards. And to find them, you must dig deeper into your passions and willpower.

You must understand how far you want to go and how you plan to do it. And if you have never thought about it, you might not know all the answers. So you might discover them one bit at a time.

2 – Transform your purpose into goals.

One difference between hoping and doing is that, in the second, you will work towards clear and defined goals.

When you don’t have anything to work for, you can’t track your success because you have no feedback on your success rate. So you may fall into many traps:

• you may think you still have time,

• that you did enough for today,

• or maybe your goals are unreachable.

And all of those traps would keep you from succeeding.

But if you break your goals into simple actions and analyze your efficiency on each, you can work better and deal with your weak points. So while transforming your purpose, use the S.M.A.R.T. goals technique.

3 – Work with milestones, waves, and focus points.

Hope is limited only by your imagination. But life doesn’t work like that.

You can’t work on anything your imagination produces. Otherwise, you will work on too many goals at once and fail at everything.

However, your success chances increase if you focus on a few things at a time. And you can always skip to the next step once you finished the last one.

Milestones are a simple way to group and correlate a few tasks. So instead of splitting your attention, you will focus on a common goal.

Otherwise, you could work in waves and focus points.

• Using milestones, you group tasks with a common goal.

• Working with waves, you define a subset of objectives with the same deadline.

• And with focus points, you group activities with the same topic.

4 – Start doing.

And now that you focussed your attention on a few goals, you can work towards them.

Leave your life of hope behind, and start doing.

Leave your hopeless dreams and start building something real, one brick at a time.

The Challenge of the Week

This week, I want you to transform your hopeless dreams into tangible goals. Think about everything you ever dreamt of, and search for your purpose there. Then, transform that purpose into simple and actionable steps (S.M.A.R.T. goals).

Unleash your potential — a 4-step life plan

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Stay consistent and stay strong.

Cosmin.