Make Your Dream Come True Day

What the day is

Make Your Dream Come True Day is observed on January 13, close enough to the new year that the resolutions are still alive.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented. The advice attached to days like this is almost always about persistence, which leaves out the harder half.

Psychologists studying how people manage goals have found that the ability to disengage from a goal that has become unattainable, and to reinvest that effort somewhere reachable, is associated with better wellbeing and in some studies with better physical health markers. People who cannot let go of an unreachable goal keep paying its costs indefinitely and get nothing back. Persistence is celebrated and taught; disengagement is treated as failure, and it is a skill.

The trap is reinforced by how we hear about dreams. Advice to follow yours almost always comes from someone it worked out for. The people who gave a decade to the same ambition and got nowhere do not publish books about it, so the visible evidence is filtered to the winners and the odds look far better than they are. That is survivorship bias, and dream advice is soaked in it.

There is also a definitional problem. A dream is usually a picture of an outcome, while a goal is a description of actions. Wanting to be a novelist is a picture; writing six hundred words before work is a goal. Only one of them can be started tomorrow, and the picture often blocks the action by feeling like progress on its own.

So the useful version of the day asks two questions rather than one: what would move this forward this week, and is this still worth the room it takes up?

How to take part

• Convert the dream into the smallest action you could take this week, and take it.
• Ask honestly whether you still want it, or only used to.
• Give yourself permission to drop one long-carried ambition, and notice the relief.
• Tell someone the actual first step rather than the dream itself.
• Find out what happened to people who tried and did not make it. That is the missing half of the data.