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Part of the Success Principles series - The importance of having a clear vision of your future.
One of the success principles is to visualise some future event, place or object that you intend to be part of your life in the future. Not just to aspire to it, or have some hazy idea as to what you want. To visualise it. To have a clear picture of it in your mind. For it to be as real as possible to you even before it is within reach - or even before there is no obvious prospects of it ever coming within your reach.
Now personally I don't hold out much hope of this working if you are visualising winning the lottery - which pretty much seals any chance of me ever winning it I guess. But heck, go for that if you want to. Personally I reckon you stand more chance of achieving a trip into space through visualisation than winning the lottery.
My theory on why having a clear vision works.
Near every moment of every day we face choices that on their own seem largely irrelevant. But our ultimate destination in life is determined by the accumulation of these marginal decisions. Left to random whim, what we do with each of these marginal decisions made in isolation has the effect of cancelling some decisions out against others. There is no consistent progress in a single, cohesive direction.
What difference will it make in the long term if we do something now or after a cup of tea? On its own, not much. But if we consistently put off everything by 5 minutes or a day with something not "productive," those minutes and days add up to years over the long term. Now please don't get me wrong - there are times when you do need to step back and contemplate stuff for a bit before you charge headlong into action. But you'll need to do that way less often if you've got a clear idea of where you are headed.
Very regularly life will pull us in this direction and that. Left to random chance, those tugs could lead you anywhere - and probably not far from where you are now. But if you know where you are going, you resist the tugs in the wrong direction and take advantage of the tugs in the right direction.
An example from my personal experience.
One example of where I have applied this with really amazing success was in growing my business from a solo effort to a 4 person team. I could see in my minds eye the 4 people that would make up that team, what their functions would be, how their efforts would integrate into a single seamless organisation. I knew the hours they would work, the skills they needed, the equipment they needed, the communication tools, the hand-over points, what their diaries would look like, exactly who would be making which calls to whom, typing up which documents, on which programs, on what paper. The detail was.... detailed. And it was so crystal clear in my mind, as I performed each function in that solo state, I was going "This person will be doing this function." For everything. All that was missing was their faces because I had no idea as to who these 3 new people would be or where they would come from.
This might not seem something that significant to obsess over, but it was a critical and tricky transition from a personality based business to a systems based business that laid the foundation for everything that our company has become today or will ever become in the future. And given exactly where I was coming from at that time, this transition was HUGE.
It got really interesting when I didn't even have to look for these people. They came to me! Simply fell in my lap pretty much as I needed them.
One of the success principles is to visualise some future event, place or object that you intend to be part of your life in the future. Not just to aspire to it, or have some hazy idea as to what you want. To visualise it. To have a clear picture of it in your mind. For it to be as real as possible to you even before it is within reach - or even before there is no obvious prospects of it ever coming within your reach.
Now personally I don't hold out much hope of this working if you are visualising winning the lottery - which pretty much seals any chance of me ever winning it I guess. But heck, go for that if you want to. Personally I reckon you stand more chance of achieving a trip into space through visualisation than winning the lottery.
My theory on why having a clear vision works.
Near every moment of every day we face choices that on their own seem largely irrelevant. But our ultimate destination in life is determined by the accumulation of these marginal decisions. Left to random whim, what we do with each of these marginal decisions made in isolation has the effect of cancelling some decisions out against others. There is no consistent progress in a single, cohesive direction.
What difference will it make in the long term if we do something now or after a cup of tea? On its own, not much. But if we consistently put off everything by 5 minutes or a day with something not "productive," those minutes and days add up to years over the long term. Now please don't get me wrong - there are times when you do need to step back and contemplate stuff for a bit before you charge headlong into action. But you'll need to do that way less often if you've got a clear idea of where you are headed.
Very regularly life will pull us in this direction and that. Left to random chance, those tugs could lead you anywhere - and probably not far from where you are now. But if you know where you are going, you resist the tugs in the wrong direction and take advantage of the tugs in the right direction.
An example from my personal experience.
One example of where I have applied this with really amazing success was in growing my business from a solo effort to a 4 person team. I could see in my minds eye the 4 people that would make up that team, what their functions would be, how their efforts would integrate into a single seamless organisation. I knew the hours they would work, the skills they needed, the equipment they needed, the communication tools, the hand-over points, what their diaries would look like, exactly who would be making which calls to whom, typing up which documents, on which programs, on what paper. The detail was.... detailed. And it was so crystal clear in my mind, as I performed each function in that solo state, I was going "This person will be doing this function." For everything. All that was missing was their faces because I had no idea as to who these 3 new people would be or where they would come from.
This might not seem something that significant to obsess over, but it was a critical and tricky transition from a personality based business to a systems based business that laid the foundation for everything that our company has become today or will ever become in the future. And given exactly where I was coming from at that time, this transition was HUGE.
It got really interesting when I didn't even have to look for these people. They came to me! Simply fell in my lap pretty much as I needed them.
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