The watermelon ice cream: why we build action plans for small longings — and not for big ones
Recently I had a very specific longing: watermelon ice cream. I thought: how lovely it would be to eat that right now. But the thought became reality — I researched where to get it, drove there, bought it. And that evening, savouring it on my couch, I thought: how remarkable. I had a longing. I took steps. And now I get to live the thing itself.
The invisible matter-of-course
What lay between the longing and the couch was — soberly speaking — an action plan: name the goal, research, route, purchase, enjoyment. Nobody would call it that. Nobody hesitated, called a workshop or waited for better conditions. For small longings we plan and act with complete naturalness, within minutes, never experiencing the steps as hurdles.
It is exactly this naturalness we lose the moment the longing grows bigger. With a career change, a founding dream, a vision for our own organisation, we suddenly believe the path in between cannot be planned — or not by us.
Why we shy away from the steps of big goals
I believe it is rarely about ability. It is that we confuse size with impossibility. Yes — there may be more steps, and more complex ones. But the mechanics are the same as with the ice cream: find out where it exists, what you need, who can help. Drive there. Begin.
And there is something else: as long as a goal stays vague, it stays comfortable. A longing without an action plan cannot fail — but it can never come true either. The first step of a plan makes the dream binding. That is the moment many shy away from. Not the work that follows.
From ice cream to a kindergarten
It sounds presumptuous to put an ice cream and a kindergarten in Uganda into the same text. But the beginning truly was the same: a longing — and then research. Who builds there? What does a classroom cost? Whom do I need to know? Questions became steps, steps became partners, partners became a building where 80 children learn today. Not one of those steps was spectacular. It was never the one great leap — it was always the next walkable step.
Every seed brings harvest. And every step taken brings you one closer to the goal.
In closing: what is your watermelon ice cream?
When I work with teams on strategies, visions or projects today, I ask a simple question early on: what — very concretely — would be the first step? Not the plan to the very end, not the perfect roadmap. The one step you could take this week. Because between every longing and its reality lies the same path as between me and that ice cream: name it, research it, set off. Our big goals deserve the same naturalness we have long granted the small ones.
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