I speak to a lot of people that want to leave their day job to pursue their dream. It seems that so many people find it very hard to make the transition. You should never spend a day of your life doing something for a living that you don’t love.

The days of slavery passed many years ago, and it’s time to stop settling for second best. Whatever your dream is, no matter how big or small it may be, you need to start now. It’s not difficult to achieve your dream, but you need to understand that getting closer to it will involve lots of small steps.

Each of these small steps may seem insignificant but when you add them all up, they become one giant step that will get you closer to your dream.

Below are five ways to get closer to your dream each day and start living your purpose.

1. Embrace the proximity effect

Someone close to me said to me a few months back, “I love to travel, but I can’t make money from it.” There are two things that are wrong with this statement. The first one is that you should never do something just because you want it to make you money.

The second point is that you can’t just go from your everyday job that you hate, to your dream overnight. If your dream is to travel the world then, you need to apply the principle of the proximity effect.

In this example, it would require you to consider doing a day job in the travel industry to begin with where you get to talk about your dream every day. Now if this seems impossible then start with a small step and get within proximity of everyone who loves travel.

There are lots of expos about your dream that occur every year. These expos allow you to meet people in every niche that exists in your dream field. This is where you get ideas from, and you can start building relationships with people you share your dream.

2. Stop doing something you hate

To be able to get closer to your dream you need to decide today to stop doing the day job or work that you hate. Just stop! You can never move forward or closer to your dream when you’re stuck in the frustration of hating what you do every day.

This doesn’t mean you can be side by side with your dream in a matter of days. If you look at the founder of Addicted2Success, Joel Brown, you will know that he didn’t go from his sales job to running this site full time in a short time. 

What Joel did though was take small steps each day and incorporate his dream in with other tasks like his day job. He started by moving away from a manual labour profession and over to a sales job. This job wasn’t his dream, but it was closer to something he was good at and helped him develop skills relevant to his overall dream.

What are you doing on a daily basis that you hate and why can’t you stop it right now?

3. Commit a specific amount of time every day to it

So I mentioned earlier about spending time each day doing something that involves your dream. The crucial part of getting closer to your dream though is that you need to block out time every day for it. Don’t make the mistake of setting a monthly or a weekly allocation of time because it’s not specific or close enough to the present moment to get you closer to your dream.

It’s very easy to get caught up in the noise of your day or distractions from other people, but you need to realise that unless you develop a habit around spending time each day on your dream, it will never happen! It will just become a dream that so many people have, and that so few fulfil.

See, to achieve most dreams you have to achieve tasks that are difficult and require hard work. The chances are that you are not the only person that has this same dream, and you are going to be competing against others to reach your goal.

You will only stand out if you outwork everybody else and be disciplined about taking daily action. Commit yourself to mastery and to being the very best at what it is that your dream involves. After all, if this dream is really something you want then having the motivation to take daily action towards it shouldn’t be that hard.

If you find that taking daily action towards your dream is hard, then it may not be the right dream for you and you may want it for unfulfilling reasons like money or fame.

4. Be open-minded to advice from successful people

One of the biggest barriers I see people facing when they try and get closer to their dream is they lack the trait of open-mindedness. It’s pretty obvious that on the road to your dream, you are going to want to speak to people who have successfully achieved something similar to what your dream consists of.

Talking to these successful people though is useless if you are not open minded to what they say. There is a very good chance they are going to tell you things that seem difficult or like hard work, but if you don’t, at least, listen and consider what they have to say, you will never get closer to your dream

This doesn’t mean you need to listen to every bit of advice they give you, but you should, at least, consider some or all of what they have to say. So often I give out what I think are golden nuggets of advice from my own life experience, and people completely dismiss them without even thinking about the idea or, at least, doing their own research.

5. Get leverage by investing money

A great way to get closer to your dream is to invest some money in it. If you want to be the next Youtube sensation, then go out tomorrow and buy yourself a good camera to record some videos. By investing some money, you will create leverage.

You will have what we call “skin in the game.” What I mean by this is that you will have invested some of your hard earned money that will create a feeling of loss if you don’t take action on your dream using your investment.

You may want to be an online entrepreneur, so go out there tomorrow, buy a domain and commission a website designer to begin. Don’t spend crazy amounts of money too early on, but spend enough that it will create some pain for you if you don’t take advantage of the money you have spent.

Pain and a sense of loss from your investment will move you much closer to your dream than what doing nothing will.

What’s your dream and what small steps have you taken recently to get closer to it? Let me know in the comments section below or on Twitter and Facebook.