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I have important news to share with you: so far, scientists haven’t figured out how to reverse death. It sucks, I know. Unfortunately, we all have an expiration date, so wouldn’t it be nice to make the most out of our life while we’re still here? Here’s where the last rule comes into play.
The ultimate failure in life is not going after the things you want. If you don’t actively identify what you want and then go after it, it will be “fate” or other people that will control your life. Let me assure you that it won’t be even a tenth as much fun as writing your own script.
Realize that if you don’t have a clear vision of your life, you’ll never be able to recognize:
- when the right opportunity appears right in front of you;
- when a key person who can help you achieve your goals enters your life; or
- when the circumstances align in such a way that you’d be able to take advantage of them and produce a breakthrough.
In the end, if you don’t know what you want, you won’t be able to identify what can help you get it, and consequently, you’ll be unlikely to ever achieve the success you crave.
Let me share with you a personal story that might look like I got lucky, but in fact it happened as a result of clearly knowing what I wanted.
After one of my businesses failed because the business model didn’t fit my personality, I realized I had to get more specific about the kind of a business I wanted to own. I told myself that it would have to be an online business that wouldn’t require me to hire employees and that I wouldn’t have to be managing it on a daily basis by taking calls, writing emails, and so on.
Somehow I heard about this thing called self-publishing, where you could write books, publish them online and people from all over the world could buy them with a click of a mouse. And there were even some people making great money with this business model!
As if by magic, I stumbled upon a forum thread in which a successful self-published author offered some tips. Having identified that his business model might be a great fit for me, I reached out to him to ask if he offered coaching.
Yet again I was “lucky,” because he was just about to launch a new course and I could join as one of the early adopters. Back then, it was by far the most expensive digital product I’d ever bought. Fortunately, I managed to scrape together enough savings to purchase it and began my education. The rest is history.
The most important lesson here is that I knew what specifically I wanted to achieve and went after it when the opportunity presented itself. It wasn’t any magical force that created the new opportunities and brought the right person in my life; by clearly knowing what I wanted, I could take advantage of the opportunities I would otherwise overlook. Who knows, maybe during this time I also rubbed elbows with a successful owner of a manufacturing company. If building such a business had been my goal back then, I would have probably seen the opportunity for what it was.
Think of this rule as putting on magical glasses that make potential resources that can help you reach your goal pop out from the background and move to the foreground of your attention. The more specific you are about your objective, the better your glasses will work.
If you’re reading this book, I assume you’re no longer satisfied with the way the current is steering your life — or you want to learn how to steer it yourself even better. One of the most powerful tools that can help you identify what you want and inspire you to strive to get it is to create a vision for your life.
By writing down exactly what you want your average day to be like, what philosophies and core values will accompany you, with whom you’ll be sharing your life, what you’ll accomplish and what habits you’ll cultivate, you’ll design a personalized guide for your life.
EXERCISE #11: CREATE A VISION
I’ll be the last person to say that you can “attract” things in life simply by thinking about them. Still, even though I don’t believe in any magical powers, I strongly, strongly suggest creating a vision for your life.
Doing so is one of the best ways to gain clarity about how you want to shape your life. It will help you make better decisions that are aligned with the direction you want to pursue, as well as avoid going in the wrong direction (or worse, having no direction) in the first place.
How do you create a vision, then? It’s not something that needs to follow a specific outline, but I’d generally suggest addressing the following parts of your life:
- Your perfect average day. What I mean by “average” is that you write about a regular day of yours, not your best day filled to the brim with excitement and life-changing events. Start by describing when you wake up, where, with whom (if anybody), and how you feel about the day ahead. Then proceed to describe your main activities for the day. It can be as long or as brief as you want — mine is just five sentences long.
- Describe your core philosophies and values. Again, be as detailed or vague as you want. I prefer to limit myself to my most important beliefs, so I mention how I manage my time (as the most precious resource in the world), how I look at the world (that it’s abundant, that there’s more than enough for everyone, and that I cultivate optimism), and what my most important driving forces are (freedom and independence to pursue growth and contribution).
- Describe relationships in your life. Include your spouse and children (if any), extended family if you want, friends, associates, and other key people in your life (mentors, employees, partners, colleagues, clients).
- Address your health and fitness. What’s your diet like? How’s your well-being? How often do you exercise and what do you look like?
Write your vision in the present tense, as in “I wake up together with my lovely spouse every day at five in the morning with a huge smile on my face, ready to work on our 7-figure manufacturing business.” Yes, it might sound a bit cheesy, but don’t worry — nobody’s going to read it but you.
Feel free to add whatever else you need to make this vision as real as possible. The goal is to identify what exactly you want to have in your life so that you have a guiding star.
I follow my vision with 10 personal rules I live by. I also have a document in which I note down goals I want to achieve, grouped as follows:
- The most important goal — limited to only one goal at a time, focused on the most life-changing objective.
- “Learn/try/experience” goals — things you want to experience just once (such as flying in a hot-air balloon or off-road driving); things you want to master (such as real estate investing), and things you want to learn, but not necessarily with an intention to dedicate your life to them (such as emergency first response or dancing salsa).
- Contribution goals — goals that extend beyond yourself and will make the world a better place. It can be running a small non-profit organization or even helping just one specific person.
- “Have/Finance/Business” goals — material things you’d like to have in your life. This includes business- or career- related goals.
- “Meet” goals — people you’d like to meet, just to shake hands or to befriend them.
- “Visit” goals — places you’d like to travel to.
Feel free to steal my structure and create a similar document that describes the goals you want to achieve.
1. You must identify what you want and go after it. Having a clear vision of your life will help you notice and take advantage of the right opportunities when they present themselves. Moreover, it all comes back to claiming control over your life. When you let the current steer you, you’ll suffer from one of the greatest failures — the regret of not making the most out of the only stab at this thing called life we each have.
2. Create your own personal vision describing how you want your perfect life to be and make a list of goals you’d like to reach, in order to fine-tune the metaphorical glasses that help you recognize when an opportunity presents itself.
