The society wants to make you believe you are not mortal.
Why?
To keep you spending, consuming and avoid the big questions:
What’s my real purpose in life?
What I really want to be and have?
Billions of people wasted their life without having achieved anything they wanted.
Numbly they let other people designed their future, because they never know what they wanted for their future.
I will teach you a small but powerful secret to decide your future, to get back in control of your life.
Firstly: What do you want?
You need to know what you want and how to reach it….you need a compass and you governing the ship of your life.
Without compass and drive you are like a boat without anyone governing it…a boat that is going where the waves and currents (that very often are your family or bosses or society) are bringing it….eventually crashing against some rocks.
You need a roadmap to be in the driver seat of your life even thought is more easy to seat in the passenger’s one and let someone else driving.
How to draw a roadmap?
I took this idea from a great book called The Pathfinder
Take a A4 piece of paper…design a spiral on it.
The starting point of the spiral is when you were born then when you went to school…5 years…ten years…the university…then when you start working..write what you did until today…and put a mark and label it NOW.
The ending point of the spiral is the day you will die (sorry for the bad news you will as well)….put an age….70…90…100..be realistic …write DEATH on it
Now write from the mark NOW to the mark DEATH what you expect to do in your life…write it into the details…visualize the targets…where you want to be…with whom…doing what…
Stop whatever you are doing and come back when this exercise is over…it has to take at least 30 minutes….it’s important…very likely the most important exercise of your life
Finished?
Interesting…isn’t ?
Do you have still time? Very likely yes…
Or maybe not
How do you know?
What the spiral is telling you?
Is it a straight line with no changes or excitement to the grave?
A 9-5 until 65y, a gold watch as retirement gift, getting old, slow and then sick and die?
Or there is something exciting inside…a new job, place to live, kids, learning something, moving to some beaches in Ecuador or Europe and sipping cocktails until Ms. Death arrive (you can have your last cocktail with her actually).
What’s this roadmap telling you ?
I am telling you my secret.
When I first made this exercise several years ago I thought “whatever, let’s waste 30 min (actually i think i spent less than 10 minutes) of my life on this”, I completed and forgot it in some notebook.
One day, many years later (12-13 I guess) the same notebook ended up in my hands.
To my surprise most of the things I planned/envision really happened!
Not all of them but most.
Never sub estimate the power of visualization
You become what you think about, all day long
As Earl Nightingale used to say in the amazing The Strangest Secret
For better or for worst.
We become what we plan in our mind, and to me this happened also well before the Spiral exercise.
I was very clear not only on what i wanted but on ehat i will become of me
i had no doubts of what i will become that to me it was perfectly normal to picture me in my actual life
everything happened effortless, without any need of driving it
That’s why fake goals simply do not work.
Writing a Running a marathon goal on your 20XX list will never be accomplished if you are not really convinced of running a marathon is what you really want… but it’s on your list just because you think it must be there
Be the architect of your life
Your life from birth to death is already programmed and designed in your brain and the architect is you and only you.
Let me repeat:
Your life from birth to death is already programmed and designed in your brain and the architect is you and only you.
You can do anything you set your mind to, man (ok…this one I stole from Eminem… 🙂 )