I forget who pointed this out, but Netflix has a subtle feature where it periodically tries to inspire you to get off the couch and live the life you really want.

Whenever an episode of the show you’re watching ends, and the next is queueing up, there’s a moment in which the screen goes black, allowing you to glimpse your own reflection. When you see your own tired, expectant face, about to invest another 47 minutes of your precious life rewatching The Mentalist, you have a fleeting chance to save yourself.

Whether you’re a binge-watcher or a doomscroller or some other type of time-bider, the following is probably true for most people reading this:

• There are things you want to do with your life that you’re not doing.
• You know these things are worthwhile.
• You know these things are possible.

And you know what they are. You want to start your own business, write your book, learn Japanese, or play Moonlight Sonata perfectly.

So why isn’t that what happens? You’d want your friends and family members to go after their aspirations, so why don’t you go after your own?

If you ever ask yourself that question, the mind has three standard deflections:

1. I don’t have time.
2. I don’t know how.
3. There will be a better time.

These answers are bogus. You don’t have time because there’s no such thing as having time. Time is fleeting by nature. You can’t possess it, or hoard it for later. Time is simply happening, all the time, and you are always using it according to your actual intentions.

And of course you don’t know how to do the thing yet. If you don’t know how, then what you want is to learn how. Part of doing anything is learning how to do it. There’s nothing that has to happen first.

“There will be a better time” is occasionally correct – as often as a broken clock, anyway — but as a rule it’s untrue. Delaying something for longer generally makes it harder. So does being older.

These phrases don’t stand up to reason, because they’re not reasons, they’re deflections.

There’s something in the human mind that’s simply afraid of new territory: new situations and new feelings. This fear is meant to protect you from new forms of pain, but it can dominate your life and prevent great things from happening at all, which is probably more painful in the long run.

As long as you heed this fear, you stay put. You get older and the aspirations never happen. You find yourself telling young people to seize the day and do the things they love, because you know how easy it is to fool yourself and end up biding your time as a lifestyle.

One way to quit biding your time

This fear of new territory is a built-in dream-killer that tends to strengthen as you age. You need to have a strategy for contending with it, at least until you’re ready to give up.

The best method I’ve found involves suspending our usual boring adult pragmatism, and thinking of goal pursuit in a more fanciful way. If you want to actually achieve your aspirations, I suggest thinking of them as quests, not goals.

You can read this post for my full rationale. Essentially, framing goals as “quests” makes the whole process feel better. If you’re on a quest, you know you’ll be entering unfamiliar territory — trepidation and unexpected challenges feel appropriate, even exciting, in this new realm.

Goals often just feel like you’re trying to be somewhere else, but you’re not there yet. You’re trying to get at the prize, and everything in the way is unwelcome.

The individual on a quest expects to feel unprepared or outmatched at times. You expect to be tested. You expect to have moments where you think you won’t make it.

Yet! The whole time, as you travel willingly through the new territory, you feel yourself getting stronger and more skilled, fast. This is what traveling in new territory does – it hastens adaptation. You learn and build skills ten times as quickly as trips in familiar territory.

Let’s say you’re trying to finally learn Photoshop. The first day, it’s frustrating trying to figure out how layers work. They don’t behave like you want them to. You can’t even make the simplest image, and the number of commands you don’t know yet is overwhelming. You have the urge to quit and go back to using lame stock photos.

This is a good place to be! The new territory is transforming you already.

By day three, you know how layers work. Your confusion on this small point has become knowledge, and your sense of inadequacy has become competence. On to the next thing.

By day thirty, you could teach people this stuff, and you’ll know it for the rest of your life.

Now — that month, in which you totally transformed with respect to this skill – could have gone by with you staying entirely in familiar territory, watching reruns, learning basically nothing. Photoshop is still a thing other people can do, and you can’t.

Imagine you made a habit of embarking on small, focused campaigns like this — how quickly the experience would add up. You could be developing new skills and opening new doors month after month if you wanted, just by taking regular trips into new lands.

New territory as a lifestyle

We use this framework in the One Big Win program. Each person chooses a quest, and then follows a simple roadmap to its completion. The idea is to take on a quest of a size you can manage, and do it in small pieces (which we call Blocks) over eight weeks. When you need help, the rest of us are there for you.

No matter what quest you choose, it’s going to take you into new territory, and if you let yourself keep going, the territory works its transformative magic on you.

If there’s a particularly intimidating part to the quest – conjugating verbs in French, or hitting “Publish” on your first blog post – we call it the dragon.

When the dragon wins, it’s by scaring you off so that you quit and go home. It will rarely beat you if you show up. Many people found that their dragon only took an afternoon or so of persistence to overcome it – sometimes just a half-hour(!) — even after it scared them away for years.

Once you slay the dragon, you get its treasure: new skills, monetary rewards, an organized house or financial life, a new identity as a writer or a programmer — whatever the dragon had been keeping you away from. That territory is yours now, and you can quest somewhere else next time.

For me this represents a whole new way to live – delving into new territory on principle. I wish I’d started doing it earlier. Life just keeps opening and opening, in small ways that add up quickly.

Join Round Three

If you want to do your first quest, a new cohort of One Big Win is now open for registration.

You may have something in mind already. Learn photoshop. Start a website. Write a story. Clean out the attic. Sell all your old baseball cards. Fix every broken thing in the house.

Settling on the right quest is part of the course, so don’t worry if you’re not sure yet. (There’s a list of quest ideas here if you scroll to the bottom.)

A group will be starting their quests on April 14, 2025. You can start on a different date if you prefer. You don’t have to clear your schedule or wait until you “have time” though – we’ve accounted for that.

Note that there are a limited number of spaces, and some are already spoken for. Don’t wait too long to register.

OBW is growing, and this will be the last cohort that’s being offered only to Raptitude readers. It’s still in beta, and the price is still pretty low for a course like this. So there’s a chance here to get in on the ground floor, before I take it public. (You get lifetime access to the course material.)

[Get started on your quest] | [How does it work?]

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