Design Your Life By Beginning With The End In Mind

Look back at the last 10 years of your life. Are you satisfied? Are you excited when you look back. Unless you design your life plan for the next decade of your life, life will just happen and you will find that the next 10 years will look pretty much the same as the last.

Great lives and incredible success do not simply happen. You design them.

The Sydney opera house did not simply happen. An architect designed it by having a picture of the completed opera house in his mind first. Then only did he build it according to a carefully monitored plan. Why do we think our lives will simply happen?

Every single top achiever in the world shares these two common factors: A relentless commitment to learning and staying a lifelong student. Setting goals and objectives that are clear, documented and visible and they have a plan with all the detail how they will achieve their goals.

Mark McCormick mentioned a 10 year Harvard study conducted between 1979 and 1989 in his book “What They Don’t Teach You At Harvard Business School”.  The 3% of the MBA graduate class of 1979 who had clear documented goals when they graduated, earned on average 10 times more 10 years later than the 97% of their graduating class who had no goals when they graduated. The difference between the graduates was the clarity of goals they spelled out for themselves.

I am amazed that most people spend more time planning a vacation of one week, than what they spend to design a life for the next 10 or 20 years. So foolish! Jim Rohn said: “We all have two choices:  We can make a living or we can design a life.”

What is your “why”?

Part of designing your life is to get clear on your why. Your why is your vision. To have clarity about what you want and why you want it.

A very good way to get to your why is to reflect on the past 10 years. What worked for you and what did not. What were your failures, what were your successes? Which were good decisions in the last 10 years and which were bad.

Think beyond some of the material goals. Think about you, the person.

Goal setting tools can help you get clear on where you want to be and what you want to achieve with your life. An excellent tool is to write your own obituary. Imagine you are standing at your own funeral. What do you want people to say about you then? What did you achieve? Whose lives did you touch and change and improve? What contributions did you make? Whose lives did you change positively? What would your children say about you?

Why is your “why” important?

When you design your life , you make a plan to achieve your life goals. As you live your life following your plan, you will experience difficulties. You will feel pressure. Adversity will knock on your door. If you have a clear why, nothing will be able to push you off course and make you want to stop. You will find a way around, over, under and through any adversity and difficulty because you will know why you do what you do.

On the other hand. With no clarity on your why you will become despondent and weary. You will want to quit when the adversity appears.

How do you design a life?

Begin with the end in mind. You look 10 years into the future and you decide where you want to be. What do you want to achieve. Evaluate all the areas of your life. Decide where you want to be financially in 10 years from now. What do you want to achieve in your business? Where do you want to be in your important relationships? What contributions do you want to make and to whom? Where do you want to be spiritually? How healthy and fit do you want to be?

Write down the goals for all the areas of your life. Write clear measurable goals. Then sit down and write down a plan of how you will achieve the goals. Break each goal down into smaller steps.  Simply writing the goals down without having a plan to start working on, is like writing new years resolutions down. A year later, you will look back and wonder what they were.

Begin from a vantage point of gratitude. If you want to create a life of abundance then appreciate and acknowledge abundance. You cannot set goals from a mindset of desperation and frustration. Write down everything you are grateful for in all the different areas of your life.

Sit down and start to design your life…