Dream Bigger

At our most recent ADDO retreat, I challenged our team.

If we are going to accelerate our impact as a business, we must do two things:

1. Dream Bigger
2. Get Better

There is tremendous power in the combination of these two. Without getting better, dreaming bigger might be intellectually stimulating but stops short of increasing impact.

Next week I’ll tackle the second point, but today let’s look at how we can continue to dream.

In college I met with Dave Muia, a senior leader in the Athletic Department at the University of Georgia. I was sharing with Dave our dreams for the philanthropy I was involved with and how some thought our dreams were too ambitious. In the middle of our conversation, he got up from his chair and walked over to a filing cabinet.

I was unsure what he was doing, but he pulled out a couple of old annual reports from Coca-Cola. (I say old, because they were a decade old at the time, and now more than 25 years old). However, he was using the vision of Coca-Cola to illustrate the need to dream bigger.

In 1996, Coke had set a goal to serve more than 1 billion servings of their product every single day. The goal was Big. The goal was Bold. The goal was Ambitious.

Here’s the remarkable part, in their 1997 annual report (only one year later) they announced they had hit the goal: 1 billion servings a day.

Did they stop, satisfied with this achievement? No. Instead, they continued to dream and inspired their team and shareholders to keep pushing forward.

1 Billion Down. 47 Billion to go. I love it!

Think about where you are right now.
Have you stopped dreaming big?
Has your organization failed to reach for the new idea?
Have you lost that passion you had in the early years of your career?
Has your church stopped trying to impact more people?

Every great advancement started with a dream.

If you’ve stopped dreaming big, take this as your challenge to dream.
Dream again.
Dream bigger.
Start today!