This is a project I'm currently working on and I thought it might be helpful to some of the people here. This is something I started after a major upheaval in my life made me question what was important to me and what I wanted for my future.
The goal of this process is to first discover what your core desires for life are, and then flesh out exactly how to go about fufiling them. It sounds simple enough, but it's something that can be incredibly helpful for those who haven't really given their path in life a lot of deep thought. It was for me.
This will probably require a significant time investment and will involve a lot of deep thought and meditation. It will hopefully be well worth it, however.
There's 4 parts to this process: What, why, how, and action.
Part 1: What?
What do you want?
To answer this question spend some brainstorming what you want in life, and write it down in a list. You can and should put down anything and everything on this list. Maybe you want to change the world. Maybe you really just want to get off work and grab a burrito on your way home. Whatever it is, write it down.
Part 2: Why?
Why do you want those things?
For each item on the list in the last part write down why you want that thing, or what goal you work towards by achieving it. Then for the goal or desire that want helps fufil, write down why you want that. And then write down why that goal. Continue this until you can't go any further up the chain.
For example, let's say you're a college student and one of your wants is to do well on an upcoming midterm. Why do you want to do well on the midterm? So you can get a good grade in the course? Why do you want a good grade in the course? Continuing this may lead to a chain something like this:
Pass midterm - Get good grade in course - Graduate with good GPA - Get a good job - Make a good amount of money - Be financially secure - Be able to support a family - Be a good parent
After doing this for all of the small wants you've brainstormed, you'll probably find that a lot of the little things are branches off the same tree that lead to a common root desire. In the end you'll probably end up with only a small handful of top level goals.
Part 3: How?
How do you go about achieving these goals?
In the last step we worked bottom up creating chains from low level wants to top level core desires for life. Now we start at the top and work back down to figure out how to achieve those goals.
Starting from your core, top level desires write down all the things you think would need to happen in order for that goal to be met. Then, for each of those things write down what would need to happen to achieve them. Repeat this process until you reach a point where all the bottom level items are things which you can do in 2 hours or less, subdividing large tasks as necessary. Make a note by all of these bottom-level items.
You're likely to reach several points where you don't know what needs to happen to achieve a specific goal. Whenever this happens, the next thing is simply to find out! Your next item down is to research how to achieve the above goal, and you can come back in fill in the rest later once you've figured it out.
Unlike the previous step where we were progressing inward towards the trunk of our goals tree, here we're expanding outwards the branches. As such this step will probably take the most amount of time. However, some of the branches will already have been filled in from the chains made in the previous step.
Part 4: Action
The last and most important step is to act on these goals.
Go through what you created in the previous step and write down a list of every bottom level item, along with how often you need to do each item, what root goal it works to achieve, and any other notes you have about it.
Voila! You now have a master list of everything you need to do to achieve what you want in life. Compare the items that you need to do daily or weekly to what you're doing right now. This will show you how you need change your habits. Schedule time everyday to do one of the items that you only need to do once or a few times. Every item should be doable within a couple hours so nothing on this list should be too daunting. Use this list as directions to live in such a way that you eventually arrive at all the goals you want in life.
Submitted October 29, 2017 at 01:44PM by Chambec http://ift.tt/2zfVSpG
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