A colleague of mine, writing a book for millennials, asked me what advice I’d give about living, loving, parenting, and leading courageously. I gave her three things: Think Big, Choose Vintage First, Steward the Planet. This is about the first one.

Make sure your entire reason for getting up in the morning is genuinely big. It can involve money, but it shouldn’t be only about money. Be obsessed with the idea, not with earning or spending the money that results from it.

Give yourself permission at any time to uplevel your thinking from Big, to Bigger, Better, and even Scary as Hell. What means Big to you may not be Big to someone else, and that’s fine. As long as your Think Big means you’ll be at least slightly uncomfortable for a spell in your day, you’re on the right track.

Thinking Big doesn’t mean your idea is fully formed by 30. It means that by 40, you have a clearer sense of how you move forward and what you deliver. And when you look back honestly at 50 or 70, you’ll see how much that one big idea actually shaped your thinking and your being.

Two examples make this real

My hairstylist is 41. Two early-teen boys. A husband who works alongside her running the machinery of their huge salon. At sixteen, she decided she was going to be a hairstylist. Sixteen years in the trenches, working for four different salons, chasing one mission: to be the best colourist in the region. Then she took the big leap into salon ownership. Two upgrades later, she decided she was going to change the industry. Another upgrade, and nearly ten years on, she’s now the acknowledged leader, the person everyone wants to work for and copy, in a population of about 400,000 people. Too many of us rank teachers as a great profession and hairstylists as a distant runner-up. I know for a fact what she brings in, and I’m gobsmacked at how far her Think Big has actually taken her.

I was promoted to manager at 25. Ten people reported to me, each earning ten thousand dollars more than I did. (That’s a different story for a different day.) My model for leadership was my father, who’d worked his way up from the assembly line to supervisor to plant manager. Like all kids, I took my cues from him.

Within six months, my team called me into a meeting set for seven at night. They informed me that while they loved my personality, as a manager, I sucked. If I didn’t change, they were all going to walk. Then they laid out what they needed: respect, space to have their weekends, an end to shifting deadlines, and a real say in decisions that affected them.

What had gone wrong was simple. My father carried a massive inferiority complex, and it made him treat people with disdain and flex his muscles even when there was no need to. That’s what I had absorbed and started repeating.

The gift my team gave me was catching it early and showing me there was a different way. That was the start of my own Think Big. Do things for the greatest good for all. At 25, I would never have conceived of that phrase, but that was the moment on the precipice when my big idea changed. Every version I’ve carried since, at 40, at 50, at 60, has been a refinement of that same idea.

We all know money isn’t the point.

We know it shouldn’t be revered or worshipped. To be truly effective, aim your Think Big to leave the world better than you found it, to be the driving force behind something specific, and to bring joy to strangers through what you do. None of that has anything to do with the role you hold, the money you earn, or the size of your team. Your own Think Big is all about the impact you have in the world.

So don’t be afraid to Think Big. It serves you and it serves the world at large.

What were you doing at 30 that turned out to matter more than you knew at the time?