6 Concrete Reminders For Anyone Who (Wrongly) Thought They’d Reach Their Dreams By Now

You might have hoped your dreams would be a reality by now. You might have had a timeline for yourself that you thought you would reach — but you aren’t anywhere close to your destination, regardless of how hard you’ve been trying, how much effort you’ve been putting in. Here are a few reminders for everyone who thought they’d reach their dreams by now:

You can’t fault yourself over things that are out of your control.

You need to stop panicking over the things that you can’t control, like when you’re going to reach success, and start focusing on the things that are within your control, like when you’re going to complete projects that you’ve been working on. Although it’s important to have dreams for yourself, you can’t determine when others are going to see your value and give you a promotion or that big deal that you’ve been hoping to land. You can only control your level of productivity.

You can’t rush your progress.

Your journey isn’t going to take the same amount of time as the people around you. Although you might have a rough timeline in your head about how long it will take to reach your destination, you can never guess what will happen. Maybe you’re in a field that is unpredictable. Or maybe you are going to suffer a setback that you never could have seen coming. Life isn’t always going to go the way you planned, so you can’t expect your career to either. But just because it’s taking you longer to reach your dreams than you thought doesn’t mean you’ll never reach them at all.

You don’t have to reach the finish line to be proud of yourself.

You should be celebrating your smaller achievements along the way. Don’t be so focused on working toward that next step that you forget to take a look at how far you’ve come already. After all, the journey is never-ending. Once you reach the next step you’ve been trying so hard to achieve, you’re bound to come up with a new goal. You can’t forget to stop every once in a while and admire what you’ve already accomplished.

You probably aren’t doing anything wrong.

When you aren’t seeing the success that you’ve dreamt about, it’s tempting to blame yourself. To assume that you must have made some unforgivable mistake. But that might not be the case. Timing has a lot to do with success. Unfair advantages, like who you know, can also play a role. So it might not be on you. You might be doing everything right, so don’t beat yourself up.

You’re allowed to consider quitting.

You shouldn’t be ashamed of changing dreams as you age. If you no longer want this, then you can walk away. You don’t have to stubbornly stick to this path, just because it’s what you used to want, just because you’ve already invested so much time into it. If you want something new now, you can chase after that instead.

But don’t give up if this is what you really want.

Of course, if this is still your biggest dream, then don’t let your failures dissuade you from continuing along your journey. Just because you haven’t reached the finish line yet doesn’t mean it’s out of your reach. It could be much closer than you think. You could be almost there.