When you were younger, you thought you could do almost anything.

You imagined not just becoming a doctor, but curing cancer.  You didn’t just day-dream about starting a business, but creating inventions that solved big problems.  You didn’t just see yourself as a poet, but the bard who reignited modern culture’s interest in verse.  (Okay, maybe that last one was just me.)

Over time, you reset your expectations of the possible.  Why?

First, friends and family urged you to be “realistic.”  Then the self-doubt crept in.  You became more cautious while also raising your standards.

After all, if you’re going to do something amazing, you have to be amazing, don’t you?

Finally, you realized the whole thing was taking a lot longer than you’d thought it would.  You were tired and your motivation was quickly sapping.

Finally you told yourself: who needs those silly dreams anyway?

When I put together the self-study version of my No Regrets Career Academy last year, I tried to answer all the questions about how to choose a career that I could conceive of in the material itself.

But the most common question I got back wasn’t about how to choose a new career at all.  What most people wanted to know was: how can I stay motivated to keep going on my quest?

In trying to answer one of the most important questions of their lives, too many wanted to just give up.

The problems that caused them to give up on their dream careers the first time were the same issues that caused them to quit the second, third, or fourth time around.  The problem wasn’t that they couldn’t dream big (though that got harder each time they gave up), but that they couldn’t sustain their efforts on a project that felt so huge.

In this post, I discuss the simple solution that’s helping my clients get over the hump, so to speak.  And why I realized I needed a dose of my own medicine.

There’s a gap between who you are and who you wish you could be.  A hole that you tell yourself can only be filled with discipline, hard work, and sometimes more than a little frustration.

But what happens if you stop beating yourself up because you’re not thinner, more productive or traveling the world? What happens when you let go of expectations, both society’s and your own?

What if the real work is to become comfortable with who you are today?

There’s a dark side to self-improvement that we don’t talk about very often, but was summed up beautifully by one of my clients, Maria:

I am so exhausted of trying to improve myself all the time that I do not want it anymore. I just want to be myself, to do what I like, to have time and to enjoy my life.  There’s not enough time to have it all. On the assumption that the next year might be the last year (as you wrote in your blog): How long shall I wait for just enjoying my life and not focusing on improving it constantly?

I couldn’t stop thinking about this question because, as Leo Babauta says, self-improvement has been a rallying cry in my life in for a very long time.  The vision of a better me kept me going when I wondered if all the time and effort I was putting into something was really worth it.

But the truth is, it also served as the basis for an awful lot of guilt and self-loathing when I failed to reach my “ideal” as fast or as completely as I wanted.  I know exactly what Maria means about feeling exhausted.

When it came to the subject Maria and I were really discussing, changing careers, the answer seemed obvious.  I told her changing careers isn’t about self-improvement at all, but about being more true to who you are right now.

That’s when the light bulb went off.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks to making real change in your life is the fear of being wrong.

How can I be sure what I want is the right thing to do?

How do I choose when I don’t know which road to follow?

What if I choose the wrong thing?

There are short answers to these questions: you can’t, pick one, and pick again.  But those answers usually aren’t very satisfying.

We assume that being wrong is a bad thing, an indication of failure.

It turns out there’s an entire profession that makes its biggest progress by admitting its mistakes: science.  Here’s how you can learn to do the same.