Take a moment to reflect on where you are in life. If I were to guess you are not where you want to be. That was definitely the case for me. It took me awhile to come to terms with the fact that I had to change to see change. That leads to the important question of what to change. Or perhaps even how to change?
These questions plagued me until I sat down and started to answer them. It started small with me looking at some of the big goals I have for myself and asking ‘how would I pull that off?’. One big goal that really stood out at the time was making a board game. I love board games and wanted to create one for myself. This gave me a small window into what my future could look like. It also brought up a lot of practical questions around how you even start working towards such a feat.
This is where building your vision of the future is essential to have any hope of achieving that which you dream to achieve. What do you do with your time? How do you take care of yourself both mentally and physically? How do you continue to take care of your responsibilities and start to build the future you desire? Take a moment and think through these questions. You might start to feel some excitement about your future or overwhelmed by the drastic difference between where you are now and where you want to go. Either feeling is totally normal, just note to yourself that this is a life long journey and not something that can be changed overnight.
To change the direction of one life does not require some mammoth sized project that you try and shove into a single day. It requires small thoughtful actions everyday. These small actions are what start to alter the very fabric of your life. Now how do you determine what actions are needed for change? The process is simple look at your big vision and distill it down to what you are able to act on RIGHT now and then do it. Not all at once but broken down into manageable chunks.
Now back to building your vision. You cannot skip over this step, it needs to be taken very seriously. Understanding where you are going is essential. You need to develop depth to your vision that makes the destination clear even when the path is murky. Saying things like ‘I want to make eight figures’ is not a vision, it gives no clear direction and puts an unnecessary amount of expectation around a result. Your vision has to be grounded in something that you control.
Back to my board game example ‘I want to build a board game that is fantasy based, well thought out and well crafted’. Do you see the difference? I control every aspect of that vision and of course I would like to make money from my efforts and need to consider that as part of the process. But a vision the money alone does not make. That is only a small peak into my vision. The whole of your vision needs to include aspects of health, family and fun in addition to the money making aspects.
To make this point clear let’s craft an imaginary future for a moment. I do it, I build the exact board game of my dreams. But to accomplish this goal I ignore the other aspects of my life and channel all of my energy into my game. Leaving my family feeling ignored and unsupported while I blinding just focus on my own goals. This would result in me letting my kids and wife down even with a ‘successful’ outcome. This would be a devastating result for me. My family is what brings me purpose and drives me forward without considering them as part of my vision I have failed.
Building a vision is a holistic process that needs to start from the foundation and build up. Each of us has different priorities by building a foundation of habits that takes care of your family, and your health you are setup to bring your whole life forward. As opposed to ended up rich and alone you can have just as much success and share it with those that you love.
As your vision starts to come together you will notice another key ingredient to success start coming into play more and more. Desire. The desire for change is something that does not come easily for those that lack vision. With the murkiness that surrounds many of the things that we look to pursue. You need to have that desire to drive you forward to make the changes required for success. As your vision becomes more and more clear you will find that the desire is just there to keep pushing forward. If you do not immediately feel the desire to change, keep refining your vision and start started on those little changes that you can make now. Desire and vision feed into an upward spiral of success and build on each other over time.
Be patient with yourself, life is hard enough. Change takes time. I have been at this for years now and every step forward results in the discovery of more to learn. This will be intimidating at first but over time you will come to get excited with every new skill set you get to learn.
Life really is like a game in many ways. But instead of the quest being set for you, you can choose to set it for yourself. This takes courage but once you set it you start to see what you need to learn to make it happen. Don’t quit amassing the skills required for success is the journey that can only be failed if you stop growing or stop trying.
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