If you’re doggedly pursuing a goal, it’s easy to become a bit single-minded, to put your blinders on and neglect everything else in your quest to achieve your dream. So much so that you might not have a plan for after you succeed. So what do you do after you cross the finish line? How can you avoid becoming the proverbial “dog who caught the car”?

        For starters it’s important to recognize that success isn’t a static state. You don’t just achieve it and then enter a permanent state of success for the rest of your life. The work to maintain your dream is just as important as the work it takes to get you there in the first place. So while you’re planning for success, and you’re working with the assumption that you’ll succeed, start planning for what you’ll need to do to keep the dream alive. Or maybe you’ll be a serial achiever, and upon achieving your first goal you’ll begin working on the next? If so, ask yourself if any of your efforts to achieve the first dovetail with what you need to do get started on the second. It’s hard to beat having some positive momentum behind you when you get started.

        Recognize also that you, like everybody, contain multitudes. There are a lot of facets to your personality, a lot of different aspects that all combine into the complete “you”. At any given time you’re expressing a subset of the things that make you who you are. When you achieve your big goal, you can be left feeling a little deflated after a while because for so long you were largely defined by chasing down that dream. But if you make time for the other parts of yourself, your other interests, your important relationships, it can help you avoid feeling like there’s a void to fill now that the mission is accomplished. (It can also help take away some of the sting of failure, but let’s keep things positive!)

        In short, the dream you’re chasing can feel like it is Everything. But it’s really just something. Something big, monumental, but still just one thing. Life is paradoxically short and long. Short, so you shouldn’t put off chasing your dreams. Long, in that there’s often quite a lot of life left to live after you’ve crossed the finish line. In your story, achieving your goal isn’t The End, it’s where Chapter 2 begins. Be ready to keep writing your story.