> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://theorencohen.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # How to Kill a Dream in Three Steps - URL: https://theorencohen.com/newsletter/how-to-kill-a-dream-in-three-steps/ - Published: 2026-09-18T14:07:40.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-18T14:07:40.000Z - Description: Welcome to Oren's Nerdy Letter #16! - Author: Oren Cohen - Tags: #newsletter Once upon a time, there was a younger Oren, in his early twenties, who had so many dreams. Over the last twenty years, he killed all of them. Except one. That dream exists within the words you're reading right now. A newsletter. A consistent one. So, to celebrate four months of newslettering, I want to reflect on the three steps I took to kill every big dream I had. ## Step 1: Doubt the dream Step 1 begins after you've had the dream. Doubting your dream introduces little cracks in that perfect image you have in your head. One of my biggest dreams was to become self-employed from my own creative work. I dreamt of that multiple times throughout my adult life. Every few years I want to try it out, and every time I kill it. This dream coming back in new forms should have taught me something, but I'll save that for a different post. Doubting the dream means raising questions about it that usually get answered if you trust the process. A good example was my first "serious" nerd publishing site, Alive2Play. Through that site, I brought together a few writers who wanted to write about games and nerd culture news. And we did write for a while. We even got some free Steam keys to review indie games. Over time, we published more articles but got no engagement from readers. And when growth wasn't happening, my writers started to leave. They had school or jobs. I wasn't paying them, so they owed me nothing. It was all volunteer work in the hope of making money once we grew enough. As plans shifted, more and more questions bubbled up. *Can we even do this? What if we give a bad review? What if other sites decide to band together against us? What if I bring on someone who's only there for the games but won't actually write for the site?* Asking these questions during the low points sowed doubt in my ability to follow through. Eventually, Alive2Play fizzled out when I started my Computer Science degree and lost faith that this site would become what I hoped. I stopped following through, which is the next step in the journey all my dead dreams followed. ## Step 2: Fail to follow through Every big dream requires hard work. You can't become self-employed from your online work if you don't have online work. In September 2020, I started Geek Peek, my nerd podcast. It hit 10k subscribers and a cumulative view count of over 3 million on YouTube. Before many of our videos actually got traction, I was publishing to no one. If I'd stopped publishing based on those early results, none of the 50 interviews Geek Peek hosted would have happened. In a way, I'm following through with this newsletter right now. Four months in and I'm not trying to sell anything. In the past, I would give up pretty easily on other projects. One to two weeks in, I would decide it's not working. It was even easier to give up when I had money problems. Then I would see the creative project as the "thing" that would save me. That is probably the worst mistake I made in some of my early projects. When you're in survival mode, you don't care about anyone but yourself and your loved ones. It's a bad place to be when making something for others because then all you can think about is the sale, and people smell that from a mile away. Then Step 3 comes in and acts as the decisive blow to the dream. ## Step 3: Move on to the next big thing They call it Shiny Object Syndrome. Is your blog not getting traffic after you posted five blog posts in the last three months? No worries! Just start a new one. See how excited you feel. Have you started a NaNoWriMo draft to write the fantasy book you've been dreaming about, and your word count is falling behind? Just give up! Try next year. Let the calm wash over you. There's a behavior in our brains that I can't quite name. It's like this relief that washes over you when you decide to give up on doing something hard. But why? Why do we feel like this? Because doing something hard might lower your chances of survival. That would be our lizard brain's answer. So when something like this happens, it tries to get you off of doing the activity. Our built-in behaviors are not a cop-out. We are still responsible for our actions. Nobody can fulfill your dreams for you. And I know it firsthand after celebrating 39 earlier this month. And yet, slowly but surely, I'm turning things around. ## What changed with this newsletter? I recognized a simple pattern in myself: I tend to overthink things. So I took productivity advice you've all heard before and made it literal: Make it dead simple. My habit for this newsletter is simple. I told myself a 300-word issue is acceptable. I don't try to reach a word count. The process of creating it is very forgiving too. I usually write these at a local book shop because I like the atmosphere. But what if I arrive late? What if I don't have enough time? I still tell myself: *Write the title. Write the subtitle. The worst that can happen is you'll finish it at home.* And that's what I did for 16 weeks. This newsletter's streak is growing and slowly becoming important to me. It's like Duolingo. Sometimes you'll do a lesson just to keep your streak. Not because you're genuinely interested in learning more Japanese or chess. Thank you for reading! What dream did you kill, and at what step? Hit reply and tell me about it. Take care, Oren