There’s been a little progress in the general life category of my mind over the last couple of months. I’ve been presented with a number of forks in the road of opportunity and I’ve been spending a lot of time mulling over which one will lead me to where I want to be in 5 years time. It seems to be very easy to get lost when deciding on what you want to achieve (your goals) and how you believe you will get there (your methods). I’ve found it easier to organise my approach to this in a way that can apply no matter what you want to do with your life or how you wish to do it.
My long-term plan schedule I define as 5 years. The reasons for this are partly because it is common practise to choose 5 years for your long-term plan but ultimately this is an arbitrary line in the sand. I chose 5 years because I predict a lot of upheaval and change in that time given my age and my current distance from my primary goals. More comfortable people may choose a longer time-frame but that’s just not me.
At this point in my life I have two primary goals. Unfortunately for me, true to my personal mantra never to choose the path of least resistance, both of these goals are colossal undertakings but achieving either will be a serious credit to my own ability and perseverance and most definitely worthy of celebration. If I could achieve either one it would be a certain boon for my self-confidence as well and the world would be my oyster as they say! This is the personal development benefit to setting yourself goals because who wants to be living the same experiences in life every day until the end?
My goals will define how I get there and what I will do over the next 5 years. Achieving your goals however still requires some degree of luck, ignoring this fact is the first step to failure unless you realise that you can work luck in your favour by moving yourself into the right position in advance, just as a chess player sets up his board for the attack, this is strategy. Your strategy will invariably involve commitments in time, money and even changes to your life-style and possibly even location. It takes time to explore each of your methods to analyse what changes you must make to yourself. Identifying these changes will allow you to decide what compromises and sacrifices you are willing to make to achieve your goals and allow you to prepare yourself mentally in advance for you to make those sacrifices.
However, even the best laid plans may not always work. You might come across an insurmountable obstacle or even a risk that the pursuit of one of your goals will leave you isolated from your support network and fall back plans. Defining a plan B will help with this and this is often the answer to the question “what is the least that I would accept”, the way I see it, the space between plan A and plan B is filled with compromises but you need to decide how far you are willing to compromise to achieve anything that is acceptable to you. If you find the pursuit of plan A takes you out of the space between plan A and plan B then you need to understand the risks that you’re taking on. Frequently this will be an investment that might not pay off, financially or otherwise, and exhausting your resources leaving you unable to pursue an alternative path.
This this the framework in mind I’ve been using to be able to decide on my goals and my methods, I’ve defined the minimum I could accept and between the two what alternative paths I could potentially take from these I’ve decided on what is the best path taking into account the risks of each. It’s a long road and I will review it continuously but maybe I might just get somewhere out of it in the end.
