Where Will You Be Five Years From Today?

(posted: 01/02/2010)

Five years.

Think about it for a minute?

260 weeks; 1,825 days; 2,333,000 minutes.

What will you do with it? What could you do with it?

Each year life offers itself to us in an endless number of ways. Each moment comes to us with both hands filled with gifts, marvels, opportunities and adventures but we seldom see or accept more than a tiny fraction of the exciting possibilities around us.

The truth is most of us are so busy doing what we think we have to do that we never get around to doing what we really want to do.

Fired from their home improvement jobs, Arthur Blank and Bernie Marcus created a business model called Home Depot and went public with their idea. Just three years after losing their jobs their annual sales were $1 billion.

At age 30, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was living in a 500 square foot apartment. Five years later his net worth was $10 billion.

Decide what's next in your life and strategize how to get it. Live your life on purpose.

Start Today

Take the kind of action that will help you and not thwart your future. The sooner you start aiming in the right direction, the sooner your plan turns out. Start by choosing your two most important "guiding stars"; your values and your mission.

Examples of lifetime values: integrity, family, friendship, health, faith, wealth, free time, love, adventure. Being guided by your highest values brings immense satisfaction and meaning to life.

Here are some questions that will help you identify your top values in life:

  1. What are the three things I like most about myself?
  2. Who is the happiest person I know?
  3. Who are the two people I like and respect the most and why?
  4. What is missing in my life?
  5. What motivates and drives me?

Identifying your top five lifetime values is a shortcut to identifying your top goals in life.

"Your few extremely powerful guiding principles that have a profound impact on how you think and act; your "soul & passion"

Next choose your personal mission. There's no specific format; only you will know how to write it. But try to keep it clear, brief and ask yourself; "What is my calling, my life's aim? What inspires me the most? What activity or service are my core values urging me to pursue?"

Some examples:

  • Walt Disney: My mission in life is to make people happy.
  • Eric Schmidt, Google CEO: My Mission is to collect all the world's information and make it accessible to everyone.

If you don't have a dream; how can you have a dream come true? A goal is a dream set to paper. Don't just think it, ink it. Unless you write you them down, goals are often lost in the shuffle and excitement of new problems and challenges.

My next blog will be some ground rules for goal setting but for now; a preview:

  • Think big
  • State in the positive
  • State them in the "I am"

This is your life. Your one and only life, and you don't want to miss any part of it. So what is it going to be? You decide. Starting today, you can make the next five years the most exciting, satisfying, productive and amazing years of your life so far, or just another five years.

"Most people don't aim too high and miss. They aim too low and hit."
~ Bob Moawad

What would you attempt to do if you know you could not fail? What dream would you love to pursue if you absolutely knew you could attain it? Where will you be in Five years? Why not you? Why not now?