Four insights to help you craft an achievable plan.
Create an achievable plan that will allow you to bloom in the new year. The new year is generally thought to be the start of the calendar year. However, it can be the start of your birth year or another memorable date denoting a new chapter in your life.
Four insights for crafting an achievable plan
1/ Create a vision for your life
When you’re crafting your plan, start by giving yourself the freedom to dream about your ideal life. Don’t let your fear of failure or financial constraints limit your vision for your life.
Start by reflecting on the people who inspire you, topics that spark your curiosity and places of interest to you to develop your vision. Then think about what you want to do, how you want to live, how you want to look and how you feel when living your vision. If you’re stuck, start with what you don’t want then restate it to what you want.
2/ Design your goals
Design thinking is a process used by designers and innovators to solve problems but is also used to solve every day problems, such as how to fit exercise into your day, how to improve your diet or what career path to take next.
The process is iterative meaning you rarely, if ever, start with the perfect solution. Rather you start by creating a list of ideas then whittle the list down to a few good ones for testing and further evaluation. Testing provides new insights about what works and what doesn’t so that you can refine your ideas and eventually, arrive at the right solution.
For Example: Identify your next career path
According to the authors of Designing your Life, we all have at least seven different career paths. Start with the changes you can make to your current career path and how you can apply your skills and experience to a new job or different industry. Then think about how you could turn your hobby or side hustle into your full time job. Lastly, think about what you would do if money wasn’t a constraint. The last one is your opportunity to write down all of your ideas including the unconventional ones.
When you’ve identified all of your potential paths, evaluate each one to deduce the right one for you now. What you choose to do now might not be what you do forever. Constraints, interests and priorities change over time. It’s increasingly common to have a second career midlife now that people are living longer.
3/ Think about your relationship to rules
Rules are an important part of how societies function. There are rules for how to live, work, play and maintain good health. How you respond to rules can influence where you work, what you do for fun, how you care for your health and more broadly, how you experience life. Paraphrasing Carl Jung’s work, most people respond to rules in one of four ways.
Four ways people respond to rules
1/ People who disregard all rules.
2/ People who only follow rules that make sense.
3/ People who follow all rules.
4/ People who follow all rules and think of even more rules.
Most people follow rules especially if they make sense. A few disregard all rules or seek to create even more. If you’re not following the conventional rules of success and not realizing the results you want, make note of it as an area for improvement.
4/ Craft a strategic plan with simple rules
Simple Rules are for thriving in our increasingly complex world. The book was written by MIT and Stanford professors, Donald Sull and Kathleen Eisenhardt respectively. Simple rules can help, even those who don’t like rules, develop a plan to achieve their goals. In fact, you may already be using simple rules and not realize it.
Simple rules are your rules for getting the results you want in every aspect of your life. The rules have to be meaningful and specific to you so that they simplify the options and help you make consistently good decisions. Making consistently good decisions every day will help you realize the small incremental steps needed to achieve your goals.
Take your time to create up to three simple rules for each area of your life that needs improvmenent. You can modify them as your plan and life evolves so that you continuously improve and grow.
Last update: 10/28/2023
