Do you have a 10 year plan? A 20 year plan? Have you sat down to think about what you want those decades of your life to look like?
I’ve been thinking A LOT about what I want to do with the next 35 years of my life – that’s kind of the type of thing you’re supposed to do with a sabbatical.And when you think deeply, the easy path doesn’t feel right, the unproven completely out of left field path feels reckless.
The one thing that you DO know is that when you hone in on your true life path, when you make decisions that optimize for what your heart truly desires, you unlock decades of success and fulfillment. So this process of figuring out what I want for the next 35 years, feels like an important thing to figure out.
Here at Unstoppable, we believe in leading a PROACTIVE life. When it comes to life plans, there are TWO plans that you actually need. You need your short term plan (this is about getting proactive about your upcoming week, the quarter, and the year) and then you need a long term “macro” plan for your life. This is the 35-year macro view.
We tend to overestimate what we can achieve in a year (which is why we tend to give up on our new year’s resolutions and short-term goals because we don’t see enough progress) and we tend to UNDERestimate what we can do in five years.
Everyone should have an unstoppable life plan. And by the way, unstoppable doesn’t mean you’re perfect and everything goes according to plan, it means that no matter what comes your way, you stay tethered to your long term goals and always find a way forward regardless of the adversity you face in your life.
Your short term plan, which we explain how to create in our Unstoppable Life planning guide is to get proactive about your year, it teaches you how to:
- Clearly define your goals for the year
- Set up a system to get proactive about your calendar and your schedule
- Set up a time so you can pause and reflect on how things are going and keep course correcting
- And, most importantly set up an Accountability Mastermind so that you are growing with others that want to grow just like you.
But to create your long term plan, you’ve got to take a step back, zoom WAY out, and take a 35-year view of what you want out of your life. You have to ask questions like:
- How do I want to spend my 20s?
- How do I leverage what I do in my 20s to live my best 30s?
- How do I manage for health, wealth, family, friends and career? And what do each of these things look like in each of the 35-years?
- What’re the things that will make me feel FULFILLED in the long run? Vs. just reacting and doing the things that are obvious and right in front of me
Needless to say, no plan is perfect, however having no plan is a surefire way to never get what you want. When I used to work for Ray Dalio at Bridgewater, he always said, “You can have anything you want, but you can’t have everything… so you better know what you want.”
If you’re looking to get started in building a life plan for yourself that you can tether yourself to, start with our Unstoppable Life Planning Guide. And then watch this episode to start thinking about how to create a macro view for your life. Both are important. Will it be perfect? no. Is it better than having NO PLAN? Hell yes.