Photo courtesy of EricaChanPhotography
A quick story behind this picture – the other 2 photos in the sequence can be found on my facebook page:
To make a long story short, this is a man-made water slide on the side of a mountain on a nice man’s beautiful property in Maui. My reasoning: well, I may as well try and go as fast as I possibly can. Makes sense right? As you can see, I went flying off the side of the “slide” and proceeded to skid along the gravel that surrounded the man-made pool at the end of the slide.
The lesson: if you’re going to do something, you may as well go all out.
The goal of this blog post: clarity.
Without a clear vision of exactly what we want, it’s pretty hard to know exactly how to get there. I was blind going down this slide on my first run, and had no idea where I was going to end up – not a good feeling, but that’s how we spend a lot of our life: lacking a focused vision of exactly where we want to go.
This is something that I’ve been struggling with lately: knowing exactly what I want out of life – and I’m sure it’s something that will change with time, and will become much clearer with time as well. It’ll always be a work in progress for sure.
An interesting fact I saw the other day was that the greatest mortality period for men is within 6 months of retirement. The lesson: never retire from being a productive person, and continually strive for something.
Planning Your Perfect Day
An interesting exercise I learned from Nate Green. Think about what you’d have for breakfast, what time you’d wake-up, who you’d spend it with, what you’d be doing. Would you work? Where would you be?
It might seem like a pretty simple thing but it helps bring clarity to exactly what you want out of your everyday life. Write it down on a piece of paper, or save it to your desktop, then revisit it in a few months. It’s fun to look over at it a few months down the line, to even make changes to certain things you no longer want, or add other things you do want.
Another way you can look at this is figuring out your “perfect situation”. Where are you living, what are you doing, how much do you need to be earning to be living this life, who are you with, and so forth…
Setting Long Term Goals, Then Break Them Down
Think about where you’d like to be 2 years from now, then 5 years, and then 10 years. Think of specifics. How do you look physically, how much are you earning, what are you doing for work, where are you living and so on.
Break the 10-year goals down to the five, all the way down to things you can be doing on a weekly and daily basis to make this ideal life become a reality. For myself, I figured out exactly how much I need to be earning to live my ideal life – it was actually a lot less than I thought it would be – I then broke that down into how much I need to earn each month, then again each day.
I broke that down into things I can be doing on a daily basis that will help me reach those long term – and lofty – goals. Things like reviewing my goals for 5 minutes daily, scheduling time with people that I can learn from, reading a certain amount of books – a great one I just read is “The Greatness Guide” By Robin Sharma.
Life throws a lot of crap at us, but a lot of great opportunities at us as well. So your plans might change, and you might get off track, but having a clear vision of what you want and where you want to be is a great thing to have.
Making a Dent
No matter what my end goal, whether it was wanting to play in the NBA as a kid, or today, building my online business. I’ve always wanted to “make a dent”. Or leave my mark. That has been an end goal that I’ve had as long as I could remember. So even though I haven’t always been moving in the same strict, direct, I’ve been – or at least trying to be – moving forward.
If you leave your mark on this world, and leave it – which could mean effecting the lives of a few, or the lives of many – a better place than it was when you got here, then you’ve lived a good and successful life.
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Any funny accident stories?
Any tips you can add about bringing clarity to our everyday lives?
In loo of the above picture…
