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Good morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's tip is that today is a great day to start planning

something big. Whether you actually do the big thing or not, coming up with a concrete plan for a

big life project will likely have positive effects in your life.

In my new book, Big Time, I devote a chapter to the idea of dreaming big, planning small.

The idea is that even very big things like listening to all the works of Mozart are doable if you break them down

into steps that are small enough to fit into your life and then you just keep going over a long

enough period of time. That's what I'm doing this year to listen to all of Mozart, doing about

30 minutes of listening

each day while driving around in the car.

I am on track to finish by the end of the year.

I start this chapter about dreaming big and planning small with the wonderful story of the

Deku family from Washington State.

This mom and dad and their two kids set a goal a few years ago to visit all of the national parks. There are 63 of them, from Acadia to Zion.

Now, the family could not easily quit the rest of their life and drive around in an RV for years

at a time, so what they did instead was rent out their house over the summers and travel between

the parks then. They created detailed spreadsheets of how to stay near the parks and visit

affordably. They did this over several years, and I am happy to

report that they have now been to 557 of 63. Not bad at all. You might not want to visit all the

national parks or listen to all of Mozart, though perhaps you do. But perhaps there is something else big in your life

that you would like to try. Maybe you never did the experience of backpacking through Europe as a

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