“If you do not know where you come from, then you don’t know where you are, and if you don’t know where you are, then you don’t know where you’re going. And if you don’t know where you are going, you’re probably going wrong.”
Sir Terry Pratchett
“I don’t have a clue what I’m doing.”
The guy sitting across from me was only 29 years old and he was in the midst of a mid-life crisis.
Given how long we’re slated to live these days, you could definitively call this guy an early bloomer.
All told, this guy didn’t really have it all that bad.
Sure, his wife left him six months earlier. And yeah, he only had a couple grand in the bank and was living on his friend’s couch. Then there was that part about barely making $28k/yr working a dead-end job that was slowly sucking his soul.
No doubt, that all sucks, but hey…it could be worse.
At least he had a friend with a couch. At least he had some money. At least he had a job.
His problems didn’t really have anything to do with his circumstances. Those were merely the symptom. The illness was something much different.
The illness was something much worse.
This Is What’s Killing You
The thing that was really turning this guy around was this:
He had no direction in life.
For a long time he convinced himself he was happy. He settled for living in a state of quasi-contentment in his relationship with life, love, and work.
He’s not the only one.
This is a pervasive problem, and it’s not one isolated to a particular geography, age, gender, or socioeconomic status.
So many of us simply don’t know where we’re going.
How can this be?
Well, it all stems from the fact that so many of simply don’t know where we want to go.
We’re riding the carousel of life, mindlessly taking the next step put in front of us with little to no thought for:
A) Where it’s taking us
and
B) If that is somewhere we really want to go.
Never-mind the fact that it’s a friggin’ carousel and we’re actually just spinning in circles.
Consider: How many people you know who’ve gone to college and fumbled their way through a degree on the grounds of:
It’s just what you do if you want to get a good job.
You need a degree to amount to anything in life, right?
So you trudge your way into a crater of student debt, pursuing a degree that’ll hopefully pay itself off sometime before you kick the bucket in 60 some odd years.
But now answer this: How many people do you know who are actually using their college degrees in their current profession?
I’m not a big math guy, but let me drop a statistic bomb on you. A study conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2013 showed that only 26% of college graduates are using their degree in their chosen career.
Think hard on that.
3 out of 4 people aren’t using their degree.
No doubt there’s a conflux of contributing factors leading to that particular stat, but it can’t be overstated that a great number of those individuals are not using their degree simply because they never bothered to map out their life.
So here we are…officially talking about Life Maps.
X Marks The Spot…But The Spot For What Exactly?
“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road’ll take you there.”
Lewis Carroll
Most of us are on society’s version of the airport sliding-sidewalk.
Go to college, get a degree.
Get a job, any job.
Start a family, squirt out a kid.
Buy a house, live the American dream.
Retire in bliss.
I don’t mean to denigrate that particular life-map. Remember the guy from earlier in this article? This was his life-map. He was well on his way.
Until he wasn’t.
And when he finally got ejected from his trajectory, he was forced to reflect on where his life had taken him.
How did I get here?
That’s a hard question to ask, because most of us only bother asking it once the wheels have come off.
Too few of us proactively ask:
How do I get where I want to go?
As a result, we are not the drivers of our destiny. We are fate’s play thing.
So do yourself a favor (not the you you are now, by the way, but rather, the you you will be in 10, 20, 50 years from now), and take an hour tonight before bed to follow the four steps I’ve outlined below.
Reflect on your answers and dig deep until you discover the kernel of truth hiding at the center of your being.
Remember:
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Plato
Begin At The End
Plotting a life-map can be daunting. There’s just so much terrain to cover.
Many of us are simply so overwhelmed at the prospect of plotting a course across the ocean that we never set sail.
But it doesn’t have to be so stressful. You don’t have to have every step along the path plotted.
You do not need to prepare for every contingency.
That would be impossible. And yet, that doesn’t stop many of us from thinking that it must be so.
So what are we to do? Where do we begin?
Well, this might seem painfully obvious, but you begin with the end.
That is, what’s your final destination
What is the end-state you wish to achieve?
Project yourself forward 50 years and imagine what a life well-lived means to you? Does it mean having built a Fortune 500 company? Does it mean being surrounded by a herd of grandchildren?
Your end-state is unique to you. And therefore only you can do the requisite soul searching.
I can not give you the answer. Nobody can.
You must do the heavy lifting here and I won’t lie, it’s not easy.
But it’s necessary if you want to skid across life’s home-plate with a big ol’ smile on your face.
So, step one is to decide this:
What does a life well-lived mean to me?
But Why?
Now you have your what, but you’re going to need a strong why if you want to maintain motivation through life’s inevitable ups-and-downs.
Did you decide that a life well-lived means being wealthy beyond measure?
That’s fine. Financial freedom is important.
Now you have to understand why it’s important to you.
Is it because you like the social recognition? Do you like flaunting it over others?
Well, that’s a fairly shallow why because it’s done from a place of personal ego that’s dependent on the opinions of others. This has been proven by countless psychological studies to be a shallow well from which to pull.
To sustain the sort of effort required to traverse your life-map, you must pull from a deeper place.
Perhaps wealth, for you, is a merely a vehicle for empowering the lives of those around you. (Philanthropy is a much stronger starting point, sociologically speaking, than ego, by the way.)
So the next step in creating a genuine life-map lies in your ability to cut through all the crap, and answer the question of why do I want this.
Here’s the hard truth: Most of us haven’t spent enough time reflecting on this question to really answer it in a meaningful way.
The first thing that pops into your head will probably sound good, by the way, but more often than not, I find people’s first answer is not actually the true answer.
That’s okay. Finding your why means first finding a whole slew of things that are not your why.
It’s an iterative process. Don’t be deterred. Keep searching.
The why you choose will dictate the depth of motivation you are able to muster towards a task.
If you want to learn the piano because it was your late-mother’s favorite instrument, and you want to learn her favorite song because it makes you feel nearer to her whenever you play it, well…
That’s a pretty strong why.
That’s the sort of why with the power to motivate even on those days when you’re tired, or burned out.
That’s the sort of why that’ll see you through to the completion of your goal.
Set Your When
Someday is not good enough.
Stupid goals are no good. They must be SMART.
Specific
Measurable
Actionable
Realistic
Timed
We’ll dive deep into goal setting in a future article, but for now let it suffice to say that SMART goals are the only types of goals you should bother setting.
Anything else is not actually a goal. It’s just a dream.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Deams can be good, but dreams alone won’t get you to where you want to go.
So for now, while pondering your life-map, I want you to consider when you want to achieve the thing you’ve set for yourself.
Do you want to go back to grad school to pursue a career that’ll offer more financial freedom, or the ability to travel more extensively?
Great.
Set a date.
It might be a date for when you want to have completed the goal. It might be a date for when you want to have started certain parts of the goal.
It doesn’t really matter when the goal is set for. What matters is that the when exists and that you hold yourself accountable to it.
How Now, Brown Cow?
It’s not enough to just say what you want to accomplish. You have to create an attack plan.
For instance: I want to learn the piano is the what.
I am going to buy a piano and practice one hour every day, is the how.
Without the how, everything else is just meaningless fluff.
Tie It All Together
After spending an evening determining your what, why, when, and how, put it all together into a personal statement.
A challenge of sorts.
The script goes as follows:
By When, I will achieve What, by How, because Why.
Final example for the evening, my friend, then you’re on your own:
By January 1st, 2019, I will learn to play the piano by practicing one hour every single night, because it reminds me of mom.
It’s a simple sentence. Zero fluff. But it contains everything you need to start setting goals, both in the near- and long-term.
It contains everything you need to start setting landmarks for your life-map.
Don’t waste another day not knowing where you’re going, how you’re gonna get there, or why you’re even bothering going in the first place.
Spend one hour this evening before bed reflecting on your life up to this point. Consider all the steps you’ve taken merely because it was the thingexpected of you.
Get off life’s carousel and hit the road.
And hey, don’t forget to take your map.
