Two Important Questions

In order to achieve the most important goals in your life, you need to be able to answer two important questions.

Question #1: What is your long term vision?
Question #2: What is your short term focus?

Let’s take a moment to look at each of these in more detail.

Your Long Term Vision

Your long term vision is what your life would look like if you’d achieved all your goals and were living your ideal life. A great way to identify your long term vision is to imagine that when you fall asleep tonight, you pass into a magical slumber that lasts for five years.

For the sake of this exercise, imagine that when you wake up in the morning, five years have passed and all your goals and plans have come to fruition. What would this ideal life look like for you?

How would you look and feel? Where would you be? Who would you be with? What sort of work would you be doing? What would you do with your free time? The more you think and talk about your long term vision, the more clear it will become in your mind’s eye.

Your Short Term Focus

Once you have a clear picture of your long term vision, the next step is to identify your short term focus. Your short term focus is the one thing that you can do TODAY that will move you a step closer to achieving your long term vision.

Here’s an example to illustrate how this works in the real world.

Claudia’s long term vision was to own a website that generated $500 per day while she was sleeping. She imagined that she would wake up in the morning and check her email to find orders from around the world. She would then have breakfast with her family before taking her kids to school.

After dropping her kids off, she’d do a class at the gym and then go home and work on the book she was writing. She’d have lunch with her husband and then do a few more hours of writing before her kids got home.

In the evening she’d help her kids with their homework and then sit in front of the fire with her husband and watch a dvd before going to sleep.

The reality of Claudia’s current situation was very different. She and her husband were both working long hours to make ends meet and found it almost impossible to spend any time with their kids.

However, despite the difficulty of her current situation, Claudia knew what her long term vision was.

She also knew that in addition to her long term vision, she needed a short term focus which was something she could work on immediately to move her a step closer to achieving her long term vision. Claudia’s first short term focus was to discuss her business idea with her husband.

The advantage of always having a long term vision and a short term focus is that they reinforce each other.

When you are frustrated by the difficulties associated with completing your short term focus, you can look to your long term vision for motivation and inspiration.

Alternatively, when your long term vision seems impossible or unattainable, you can make the decision to just concentrate on achieving your short term focus which is much closer at hand.

In this way, your long term vision and your short term focus act in combination to pull you towards achieving your most important life goals.

So today I’d like to encourage you to take the following steps:

(1) If you haven’t already done so, find a quiet spot and write down a description of your long term vision. Describe in detail what the world would look like if you could wake up tomorrow to find that five years had passed and all your goals had come to fruition.

(2) After reviewing your long term vision, identify your short term focus and take action today to move one step closer to making your long term vision a reality.

Until next time,

Dare To Dream!

Anthony