When you wake up in the morning, do you have some sort of plan to guide you through the day? Not a rigid schedule, but a set of heuristics to help your decision making about what to do and what not to do? What about your life—do you have a life strategy?
Most of you probably have your decisions decided for you automatically and you probably rush through the day on autopilot—you have kids to feed and send off to school and/or you have to get dressed yourself, jump in the car/bus/train, and commute to your cubicle at work. You come home, fix food for the family, watch television, then go to bed. Rinse and repeat.
But my guess is that these are things you feel you “have” to do rather than things you “want” to do. These are things you do by default, since, well, what else is there to do? I mean, you have to go to work at your job for someone else, whether you like it or not, until you can retire, right? Aren’t those the rules?
Maybe, you probably think, things will change once you retire—then you can travel, see the world, start that hobby you’ve always wanted to pursue, maybe even open your own business and work a few hours a week, just for yourself. After retirement would be a good time to plant a garden, start eating healthy. You might even start walking or try other forms of exercise. Then. Later.
I think this is the default strategy most people use because: 1.) this is what everyone else is doing, and 2.) most people do not take the time to step back and take a critical look at the life they are living versus the life they want to live.
This default life strategy can have very tragic consequences, because it moves the fulfillment of one’s dreams and goals into the phase of life (old age) when even just living is more risky, not to mention the unknown state of the economy, the unknown state of the environment, or the unknown state of turmoil in the world caused by humans who refuse to live peacefully with one another.
On a recent trip touring castles and cities in Europe—one of my life goals (you are looking at Neuschwanstein Castle in the image above)—some friends told us of the story of someone they knew, a man 73 years old. Evidently he and his wife had used the default life strategy of working hard and putting off their dreams of traveling the world together until after retirement.
Once the man and his wife had both retired, they began planning all the trips they would take together—cruises to exotic locations, safaris, coffee at a cafe in Paris, visiting the wonders of the world, and just spending time together with no worries.
But then, right before their first trip, his wife got sick and died in three days.
The man now sits at home with no will to live, his heart crushed.
Hearing a story like this makes me very sad, because choosing one’s life strategy is one of the few things in the world that we have 100% control over. This does not mean we will always achieve our dreams and goals, but we are able to choose our dreams and goals and no one else can stop us from doing so.
Yet few people do so.
Having a life strategy that guides our daily actions so that, little by little, step by step, we make daily progress toward our goals, is something that will increase the probability of realizing our goals. Thinking about what we want out of life and formulating a resulting strategy can be done by anyone, at any time. Today. Now.
Using the default life strategy of living a deferred life seems too risky, and results in stories like the gentleman above. A life spent working in an undesirable job with deferred dreams and goals is an unfulfilled life.
We must be proactive if we want to have a different outcome with our life, especially since time can be so fleeting.
This is the good news—you have the benefit of now.
You can take a look at my book First Steps Toward Becoming Heroic for specific help and exercises, but please at least do this—take charge of your life. Think about your life goals and create a strategy for achieving them. Then, a little each day, work toward your goals. In this way, when you look back over your life, you will not have any regrets, only rewarding memories.
So, why not take some time today to work on your life strategy?
Why not now?