Have you written it down yet, your dream?

Six or seven years ago I was cleaning out my home office space and came across a folder of loose sheets, each one handwritten with this phrase (or a variation of it):

We are selling more than $20,000 a month.

This sentence was jotted down about 20 times per sheet. Each sheet was one day of writing down this dream. It was from the first year or so that our gallery was open, when such numbers were a hookah pipe dream.

You’ve likely heard this: If you write something down repeatedly, day after day, it is much more likely to come to pass. You train your brain to believe it is actually possible, then likely, then even a certainty. Your brain — and the whole wild world — find amazing ways to bring it about.

There are two astonishing things about this $20,000-a-month-in-sales declaration that I want to share with you.

First, that it came true!

By the time I re-read these note pages we were so far beyond $20,000 a month in sales that to suddenly average that amount would have been catastrophic it would have been so low. Even after the 2008 stock market crash we posted better numbers than that.

When I came across the folder I had long forgotten about this exercise, which probably lasted no more than a few weeks to a month before I stopped doing it. I had forgotten about it even when we hit the $20,000-per-month-in-sales milestone, a couple of years after they were written.

Second, that I got what I said I wanted but it wasn’t what I really wanted.

The corollary: 

You must be careful what you focus on.

I say this because it wasn’t the $20,000 in sales per month that I really wanted . . . what I really wanted was healthy profits. By focusing on a secondary effect — the sales — and not the actual desired effect — the profits — I attained what I was clear about and didn’t attain (until later) what I wasn’t being clear about, healthy profits.

Always, always focus on what you really want. (Is the moral of the story here.)

Here’s the other thing: 

Have you written down your dream yet or what? 

You’ve heard it expressed countless times. You know the Jim Carrey story (of writing himself a check when he was a struggling actor, for $10 million dated for a few years later). If you don’t, Google it, you’ll find it easily.

The point is, you don’t have to do it the way I did it. There are so many ways. Vision boards. Journaling about it. Writing it once on a check like Jim Carrey did (though he kept it with him always in his wallet, went up to the hills over L.A. and held it out over the city, used it as a springboard to his dreams often often often).

There’s even this, someone writes something down once and forgets about it — and finds it later, astounded to find it all came to pass. As happened to the twelve-year-old son of Henriette Ann Klauser, author of Write It Down, Make It Happen. 

She tells how her son came to her perplexed and amazed, having just found a sheet of paper he’d forgotten he’d written a year or two earlier, detailing a number of things he wanted to do. They’d all come to pass! 

He wrote it down once and forgot about it.

Why is this effective?

Because in writing something down you must be very clear. Or else you can’t write it. You can think vague thoughts, but when you write something down it forces clarity.

I also feel you make a statement to yourself and to the inexplicable universal forces at your disposal when you write a dream goal down. 

So. 

Are you going to pussyfoot around for another few years or are you going to write it down?

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