The type of person you want to become—what the purpose of your life is—is too important to leave to chance. It needs to be deliberately conceived, chosen, and managed. The opportunities and challenges in your life that allow you to become that person will, by their very nature, be emergent.
We all want our lives to be great. We have big aspirations for the future and hopes and dreams of the lives we will someday have.
Often though, it may feel like the gap between where we want our lives to be and where they are is simply too large. We can struggle to see how we could ever have the life of our dreams.
So how do you build the life you want? How can you make your dream a reality? In this article, I will show you how. But first, let’s start with a story.
The Parable of the House
There once was a man who wanted to build a new house. He had lived in an apartment for many years and was finally ready to build his dream home.
After he had found the perfect place to build and secured the land, he went about finding a contractor to build his home. Eventually, he settled on a contractor who promised him that he could build whatever the man wanted. This contractor had worked on a variety of beautiful and impressive homes and the man knew he could trust the contractor to deliver on his vision.
As the two began discussing the man’s hopes and dreams for the home, the contractor could tell that the man had a grand vision in his mind. Despite this however, there were still many details where the man was unsure of what he wanted to do.
The contractor suggested that the man needed to finish planning before they began to build. But the man was too excited to see his dream home become a reality and insisted that they start building immediately. When he saw that the man wouldn’t relent, the contractor eventually agreed to start building as soon as possible.
As construction began, the man was excited to see the great leaps forward in the realization of his dream. Starting with the pit for the basement and quickly followed by walls and a roof, the home seemed to materialize at a startling pace.
The contractor came to the man often with questions. How should this room be laid out here? Where do you want the windows there? How high do the walls need to be? The stream of questions seemed unending, but the man was generally able to quickly answer the questions, so the progress on the home moved forward.
As the work continued, the types of questions became more and more detailed. It was at this time that the man started to notice that occasionally, the contractor couldn’t deliver on the man’s vision. When asked about doors for the home, the man discovered that the doors he wanted only worked with higher ceilings than he had chosen. When asked about a particular style of windows, he found too, that what he wanted was no longer an option.
At this time the man began to doubt that the contractor could deliver on his dream and he finally fired the contractor feeling that if his dream were to be realized he would have to do the work himself.
The man worked on his home for years. He tried to make every detail fit his vision for his home. When he finally finished however, he found that his home was very little like the dream house he had originally set out to build. It lacked the functionality and grace of the home he had once seen in his mind.
How could he have gotten it so wrong?
How are we building our future? Are we making it up as we go along or do we have a plan?
The truth is, we can all build the future we want, we just need to know how.
What Future Are You Building?
You should be more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results. If you want to predict where you’ll end up in life, all you have to do is follow the curve of tiny gains or tiny losses, and see how your daily choices will compound ten or twenty years down the line.
What kind of home are we building our lives to be. We may often feel that we can’t predict the future. It is true that we are not able to predict everything that will happen to us. But, as James Clear mentions above, we can predict to some level what our future will be by looking at the overall trajectory of our lives.
We can often tell by the general patterns of our lives, what types of outcomes are most likely to occur.
So what does your future look like? Where will the path you are currently on lead you in ten or twenty years? Is that a place you want to be?
When we ask ourselves these kinds of questions and are honest with ourselves, we may find answers we don’t like. If you feel you are not on a path that will lead you to the marvelous future you desire, now is the time to change.
The best way to predict your future is to create it.
Abraham Lincoln is right. The best way to better your future is to start today to create the future you want.
How Can We Create A Better Plan?
We can’t be true to ourselves if we don’t know what we want, and more importantly why, so that’s where we must begin.
In order to build a better future, the first thing we need is a clear vision of what that future will be. If you going to build the future you want, you must first know what future you want to build.
Take time to sit down and determine what you really want your future to be. Don’t worry about what you think your future should be. Instead focus on what you really want.
Your goal is to make a plan for where you want to be in three years. You must ask yourself what kind of person do you want to become? What kind of life do you want to be living? What accomplishments do you want to have completed?
Be honest and be specific. The more clearly you can see your planned future, the better you will be able to work to build that future.
When you start with a plan of where you want to go, you dramatically increase your likelihood of getting there.
How Do I Focus On My Top Priorities?
Whether we are approaching behavior change as an individual, a parent, a coach, or a leader, we should ask ourselves the same question: “How can we design a world where it’s easy to do what’s right?” Redesigning your life so that actions that matter most are also the actions that are easiest to do.
It may be that you don’t really know what you want your future to be. If you haven’t thought about it in a while, ask the following questions to help you clarify what you want:
What do I love about my life right now?
What do I wish were different in my life right now?
What have I always felt I want to do, but have not done yet?
How can I better serve those around me?
What kind of person do I want my future self to be?
What can I do today to take one step closer to being the version of myself that I want to be?
What legacy do I want to leave?
One of the most important questions you can ask yourself are the following questions suggested by Brian Tracy:
#1. What’s the #1 thing I could start doing today that, if I did it consistently, would have the most positive impact on my life? — then do it.
#2. Whats the #1 thing I could stop doing right now that, if I stopped doing it, would have the greatest positive impact on my life? — then quit doing it.
As you ask yourself these questions, write down your answers. Review your thoughts and find what really resonates with you. Determine where you want to find yourself in three years and then write it down.
How Can We Build Better Each Day?
No one “builds a house”. They lay one brick again and again and again and the end result is a house. Nearly every big undertaking can be boiled down to a core unit of progress—its brick. A 45-minute gym visit is the brick of getting in great shape. A 30-minute practice session is the brick of becoming a great guitarist.
Just as a house is built brick by brick, you build your future day by day. The key to building a great future is to build great days.
Each day we need to ask ourselves what we can do today to take a step closer to the future we want? What big thing or little thing can we do that will not only bring us closer to our desired future, but will make that future inevitable?
These actions typically do not happen on their own, especially when we are trying to change the course of our lives.
It is important to remember that you are an expert on living the life you are currently living. You probably don’t even have to hardly try any more to be the person you are right now. As you take actions each day to do what your desired future self would do, you will gradually learn to live that life.
This takes consistent work and effort.
Be Patient With The Process
You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. That means developing great habits. Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishments, and that bridge must be crossed every day. Over time that daily crossing becomes a habit. And ultimately, people do not decide their future; they decide their habits and their habits decide their future.
In order to become your dream self, there may be habits you have now that you will have to change. There will also be habits you don’t have now that you will need to create. Take time to think about what the individual “bricks” are that you will use to build your habits. We form habits as we build with those individual “bricks” consistently over time.
If you don’t take the effort to determine which daily bricks will build the future you want, you will keep building with the daily bricks that have built the life you are now living. Remember that you can change your future, but in order to do so, you must change what you are doing today.
How Can We Correct Our Course?
Every one of us, if we would reach perfection, must [at] one time ask ourselves this question, ‘What lack I yet?’
In the Bible, we are told the story of a young man who was living an exemplary life. He was doing all the things that he had been taught to do. He came to Jesus Christ to ask the question, “What lack I yet?” and was told what he needed to do to improve.
Regardless of what your goals for the future might be, it is important to regularly ask this question of ourselves.
As you work to build the future you want, your vision of that future will clarify. Take the time to review your progress and evaluate what you need to do next. Taking the time to ask “What lack I yet?” will help you to determine new areas where you need to improve as you work to build the future you desire.
What Happens When We Fail?
The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency.
Change is hard. No really, change is HARD. As such, expect that you will have challenges as you work to build a wonderful future.
You are changing yourself into a new person. You are becoming the person who lives the future you are building naturally. But you aren’t that person yet.
You will encounter obstacles as you work to build new habits and become a new person. At those times, remember to look at your successes and try not to dwell on your perceived failures.
Measure the GAIN, not the GAP.
Remember that as you work each day to be better you are steering the overall course of your life. Look at the overall change in who you are becoming. Take time to acknowledge the improvements you have made. When you see the improvements you make you can guard yourself from the frustration of the minor upsets you will surely encounter along the way.
As you continue to strive to act as the person you desire to be, you will gradually become that person.
Conclusion
A strategy is created through hundreds of everyday decisions about how you spend your time, energy, and money. With every moment of your time, every decision about how you spend your energy and your money, you are making a statement about what really matters to you. You can talk all you want about having a clear purpose and strategy for your life, but ultimately this means nothing if you are not investing the resources you have in a way that is consistent with your strategy.
We are each building our future one day at a time. Each and every decision we make is building that future one step at a time.
To build the future of our dreams, we must start by creating a vision of what we want that future to be. Then we have to align our actions with that future. When we use the vision of our dream future to guide our daily actions, we not only make that future possible, we make it inevitable.
Have hope and know that your grand future is waiting for you. Start building your dream future, today.