My first advice for you is: Plan for your future! Easier said than done, but a very smart task to spend your resources (time and/or money) during the next few days or weeks. Living without a plan in your life, or business, is like sailing without knowing where you want to go, the wind and currents will take you anywhere, taking you to places you don’t want to be. Going about in life not knowing where you’ll end up, you may as well drop the sails of your boats and not go anywhere at all. Even if you do know where you want to be, if you let external elements guide you, you’ll very likely end up in an unwanted place.
Personally, I have made some not-so-good decisions for not planning beforehand. I have three degrees, a BA in Computer Science, a BS in Electrical Engineering and a Master’s in Business Administration. Did I go through a process of planning in order to choose the best degree? No. Could I have done better? Definitively! Even though I’m passionate about electronics and engineering, once I got my diploma I never worked as an electrical engineer. The reason being, there were not enough technology jobs in the place I wanted to live. If I had spent a few minutes planning what I wanted for my future, I would’ve known where I wanted to live and what I wanted to study.I would had realize immediately that getting a degree in Electrical Engineering wouldn’t work if I wanted to live in the place I desired, and instead I could’ve gotten a more useful degree focused on the functional areas I really liked and on the jobs available in the place I wanted to live.
Like a business, the process of planning our lives need to follow certain basic steps. This process is not unique and there are many others that would take us to the same place. The most important feature, when it comes to planning for your future, is that you can start preparing for what’s to come right now.
The first step of the process involves the task of writing down your vision, that is, determining where you see yourself in the distant future, what do you want to accomplish. Once you have defined your vision, then you need to write down how your vision will impact your goalsor what your mission is going to be in the shorter term. The mission is very important because it will guide you to your vision giving you a goal, or a set of goals, that you can start working on them right away.
Now that you have a clear mission statement in your life, you can initiate working on how you will achieve your goals, no matter the size of the challenge, you need to know yourself. This introspective process, of defining who you are, should start by defining what are your strengths and your weaknesses. Continue the process by defining what are your areas of opportunity where you can grow, and what external factors could work against or in favor of your goals.
Finally, once all those elements are clearly defined, you should be able to write down the different tasks, and short-term activities that you need to execute in order to achieve your mission, which ultimately will lead you to achieving what you want to be in the future. Be aware of the whole process, because having fun in the process is essential and will probably define if you’re going to be successful in your life. Enjoying the process could be more important than achieving your goal!