Want to Create Something Amazing? It Starts With One Big Step

Maybe you’re a writer. Or a business owner. Or a professional marketer.
Or all three of those.
Maybe you’re looking to widen your audience. Or you’re just looking for reasons to be a little more excited when you get out of bed every morning.
Maybe you want to launch a dream.
Maybe you’ve worked up the courage to want to do something epic.
Even if you haven’t shared that dream with anyone yet. Even if it’s still something private.
If you do have a secret dream, congratulations. Because a commitment to doing something great — something that makes us catch our breath a little — will take you farther than anything else will.
But you don’t build something epic just by getting a wild hair. Whatever you’re building — if it’s worth building — you’ll go through three phases.
1. Dare
If you’re going to build something — a business, a blog — that takes our breath away, it has to take your breath away first.
One of the great things about working with Brian Clark is that he doesn’t really have much knack for doing little projects. He’s always got a bigger dream. It’s part terrifying and part exhilarating.
I love baby steps, and that’s what I teach. I believe in baby steps.
But baby steps toward something that really gets your motor running … that’s much more satisfying.
That dare is the big step. Once you’ve let yourself dream about something really big, the rest of it is logistics.
Whether you create your dream exactly the way you see it in your head isn’t the point. Daring is the point.
2. Prepare
If you’re planning a jump from 128,100 feet that will take your body up to 833.9 miles per hour in free fall … you’re going to need to do some prep.
The greater the mission, the more preparation you’re going to need.
You probably don’t know everything you need to know to make your breathtaking dream happen. (If you did, it would just be a “pretty big” dream, which isn’t as much fun.)
So educate yourself.
Your dream probably isn’t something you can do all at once. It will happen in stages. Figure out what those stages are.
Take practice jumps. Work out the problems that come up at 10,000 feet before you climb to 128,000.
This is what most people call “the hard part.”
You know what I call it? The fun part.
This is what you’ll look back on later with great fondness and a hell of a grin on your face.
This is what pulls you out of bed in the morning so you can get started on the next milestone.
Solving problems, gaining knowledge, pushing out experiments … this is what being a human being is about. Enjoy it. Learn from it.
3. Jump
I hate the saying, “Leap, and the net will appear.”
That is a lousy maxim when you’re heading for the ground at over 800 miles an hour.
Build your net. Study your net. Understand your net.
Felix Baumgartner and Red Bull started working on their legendary space jump in 2005, and didn’t actually make the jump until this week in 2012.
It took seven years to perfect the net. To work out the kinks and understand all the angles.
Realize that the net can never give you 100% certainty.
Jump anyway.
It’s a hell of a ride.
About the Author: Sonia Simone is co-founder and CMO of Copyblogger Media. Get more from Sonia on Twitter and Google+.