Ask yourself the following:
1. I have created a life-strategy plan for the next:
a. 20 years.................Yes No
b. 10 years.................Yes No
c. 5-years..................Yes No
d. 1-year...................Yes No
e. 1-week...................Yes No
If you knew how to create a life strategy and implement it, would you be interested in doing so? ……………….Yes No
Very few people take the time to think through, and commit to paper, a life strategy for the future.
Surely, we all set certain life goals such as finishing High School, obtaining a college degree, attaining a specific professional position, reaching an athletic goal, or achieving a particular level of personal income.
However, in general, few people look to the future and fashion a wide-ranging and cohesive life strategy that would reach 5-10-15, or even 20 years into the future.
Normally, people maintain much shorter life-strategy horizons because it is difficult and very challenging to look far into the future and predict an outcome. In addition, most people, from an early age, do not learn why it is important to create a life strategy.
The lack of long-term life-strategy horizons could also be an intrinsic consequence of our culture and its orientation to instant gratification and wanting everything NOW! You could say a lot about the importance of living in the moment and of not being obsessive to the point of planning one’s life down to the last detail. After all what about spontaneity and embracing the naturalness of life as it unfolds?
We could not agree more.
However, we have always encouraged people to develop some form of a life strategy so they have something to look forward to, and, at the same time, set productive goals that have meaning, substance, and represent a raison d’être for their many years of living.
A life without some life strategy is like a boat without a rudder.
Your boat will definitely get you somewhere due to the forces of wind and water currents, but where you end up may not be where you really want to go.
For that reason, it is important to give your life some direction to end up where you want to be in life in the future.
Bear in mind that you do not have to give up spontaneity or the natural evolution of your life to embrace a life strategy even 20 years into the future. It is equally important to be open to all possibilities in your life so that you do not overlook opportunities that might come to you.
You will discover that when you have a life strategy that has a 15-20 year horizon you will be continually refining your life strategy as you gain more knowledge and experience in your life. Additionally, you will also learn to fine-tune opportunities as they present themselves, which further enhances the fulfillment of your life strategy.
Consider a long-range life strategy as a chart of your future, which has elasticity so that you can tweak it from time to time to perfect its outcome.
Conversely, you should build your life strategy on a solid foundation of clear life-goals.
Goals like self-reliance, financial self-sufficiency, and entrepreneurialism.
For instance, let us say that one of your major long-term goals in a 20-year life strategy is to retire a multi-millionaire at age 50. That certainly is a reasonable and worthy goal for anyone. However, let’s say you get within 10 years of your goal and lose everything in a bad business deal. At that point, you literally have to start over to rebuild whatever portion of your multi-million dollar retirement nest egg that you had already accumulated.
Does your life strategy change? Yes, it certainly does.
The biggest change is that you now have to extend your retirement age to 60 instead of 50. Then again, based on all of the knowledge, valuable contacts, and business savvy you have acquired in your life thus far you might be able to shorten the time horizon to your goal.
More often than not that is exactly what happens with entrepreneurs who encounter a major setback, they come back even stronger. As a result, the life-strategy goal of retiring a multi-millionaire does not change, only the timeline changes.
Clearly, developing a life strategy makes a lot of sense and can be useful to just about anyone.
In future articles, we’ll discuss these questions: How do you go about creating a life strategy? What are the steps, and how do you maintain a life strategy over time in order to reach your goals?
