I want to invest but I'm clueless about stocks

CHASING A DREAM
When will I become a big businessman? I'm now 21 years old and I want to achieve a big goal in my life. I want to identify by my ownself, and I want to do something in my life. But I am facing financial problems. So how is it possible that someone let me out from this finance problem and help me and also help me to introduce a new business which can fly over the sky? Would the dreams of my eyes comes true? If they are true, then when?
Sajjad R.. Karachi, Pakistan

Dreams are a great place to start. Without big dreams you can’t get very far. But how do you make the success you’re achieving in your dreams into success in the real world? That, of course, is the hard part.

There’s no one answer for this question (which we get, by the way, in various forms by the dozens.) Each dream is different, so there’s no one book you can read, or person you can ask, or advisor you can pay to make your dreams come true. (Unfortunately, there are a lot of unscrupulous people out there who claim to have written that book or possess that expertise and are more than willing to offer up their advice – for a fee, of course.)

Successful people do seem to have a few common qualities, even as they take many different paths to achieving their dreams. The first thing is that they are able to see their dream as more than that: they are able to convince themselves that the dream can and will become reality. The young entrepreneur who walks down the street wanting to be the next Donald Trump looks up at a building and can “see” himself building the next skyscraper. This takes an unusual level of self-confidence (some would call it arrogance) that not everyone has.

Once you know where you’re going, you need to figure out how to get there. Success – even so-called “overnight success” – is almost always a series of much smaller successes strung along toward your big dream. So try to break your “big dream” into a series of “little dreams.” Find others who have achieved that “little dream” and find out how they did it or, better yet, ask to meet them and tell you their story. It’s easier than you think: successful people love to talk about themselves and their success. (If you’re too shy to ask, you’ll need to overcome that.) Figure out what you don’t know that you need to learn. Find ways to meet as many people as you can who may be in a position to help you.

You’ll also have to take risks. But there are good risks and bad risks. Successful people learn how to tell the difference. Jumping off a building is a risk with no reward (other than, perhaps, the momentary thrill of descent.) Jumping off a building as a stunt man for a movie – with all the appropriate safeguards – still carries risks, but it’s more rewarding. The trick is to be ruthlessly honest with yourself about the potential rewards and realistic odds of achieving the outcome you want, to know as much as you can about the risk before you take it, and then to do everything you reasonably can to reduce that risk. If the odds aren’t in your favor, walk away.  

For many people, dreams are financial: A house, a car, financial independence. If your financial circumstances are holding you back, the same plan applies. How did you get in your current financial problem? Who can help you get out of it? What do you need to do to turn it around? What do you need to learn? Make a very specific plan. If that plan doesn’t work, try another one.

And lastly: No matter what your dream, the most important element is hard work. A lot of people who don’t succeed try to skip this step. You will almost certainly need help from other people – especially those who are smarter than you. But no one will work harder toward your dream than you. People who dream big need to be able to back that dream up with a determination – some would say an obsession – to make it happen.

In the end you may decide that it’s not worth devoting that much of your life – giving up time with family and friends, or devoting so little time and energy to helping other people - to achieving your dream. To change course is not necessarily the same as failing at your dream. Dreams can only carry you so far. You may even find your life taking a path you hadn’t imagined when you were a young man. For many people, success comes from being alert to unexpected opportunities, being open enough to embrace them and then changing course.

So fly high. Good luck.

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