It took you five years to get to where you are right now. If you look back over the last five years, you can see how everything unfolded to have you arrive where you are today. You may, or may not, have exerted a great amount of planning and effort to come to where you are now, or just let it unfold on its own. Nonetheless, it’s been five years, and here you are.
In just the same way, you could be living a completely different life, the life you’ve always dreamed of, in the next five years, and you can do it yourself. You don’t have to break any laws, compromise your morals, or deceive anyone in order to live the life you’ve dreamed of.
I’ve known of and helped many people do just that, create the life of their dreams with extremely humble beginnings (some the humblest imaginable) and all it takes is creating a vision and mapping a path from here to there, with a little movement along the path every day, you will arrive at your destination.
Now, making a commitment for five years might sound like a long time at the outset, but think about the other commitments you make for five years, like for school, relationships, buying a car, or leasing an apartment. We all make five-year commitments to all kinds of things, why not something that can dramatically change your life for the better?
It may take a year, or ten years to get there, but you can do it if you do a little something-something every day to move you closer to your best life ever.
The basic process is simple enough, first to visualize your life in five years, then to break the progress necessary into chunks of manageable size to get you from here to there.
This works for anyone, unemployed, underemployed, over-employed, artists, inventors, novelists, organizations and businesses, no matter where you are or what stage of life you are at in this moment.
To visualize all you need is a good imagination and a way to document the results. Close your eyes, and see in your mind’s eye the life that you want in five years, with as much detail as possible. Use all five senses and write it down while being very descriptive. The more detail, the better.
Next up, develop your map. Start from where you are by evaluating all the resources you have available at present, in essence, packing your bags for the journey, and it will be a journey, not a vacation.
A vacation, you start and it is paid for and budgeted (normally) in advance. A journey, on the other hand, you embark upon with what you have, and you pay for it, and make adjustments, as you go along the way.
No journey is ever taken without starting or taking the first step followed by many successive steps.
By reducing your journey into sections, it allows you to stop and reevaluate your progress along the way. Think of these as landmarks. It’s like charting a nationwide trek with key points or destinations to acknowledge along the way. You might stop at the Grand Canyon along the way, only for you, your Grand Canyon might be buying a house, horse, or bus to rent or building a website, investing in a certain amount of stock, or bitcoin, etc..
Whatever it is, you have these milestones, or goals marked out on your map in succession, so that your five-year plan will have you at your Grand Canyon at the specified time, say in six months. If you’ve accomplished your goal, you can feel rest assured you are well on your way and your map is accurate.
If you’ve made it to the Grand Canyon ahead of schedule, then you might want to revise your map, or at least the timeline, because if you keep it up, it looks like you’ll be living the life of your dreams a lot sooner than you expected.
If the date has come for you to be at the Grand Canyon and you can see that it is still a way off, then this is an indication you need to revisit your method(s) of progress. You may well be moving toward your goal a little every day, but it might be time to step up your pace or to readjust your expectations.
In any case, your best life, the life you could have only imagined before, is waiting for you only five years away, maybe sooner.
