Why is it important to know where we are going?
When I was a child I used to hear others saying, that it‘s not good to make plans? They used to warn me that something might go wrong and it‘s better if we don‘t challenge the faith with our specific desires. After all, if we don‘t have any expectations we won‘t have any disappointments neither.
This is why I became a professional at hoping that everything is going to work out for me in the best way possible. If something didn‘t happen, I always told myself that it wasn‘t meant to be. In this way I learned to calm down and move on. This strategy, that I considered „very successful“, made me a person who doesn‘t like making plans, a person who prefers making decisions in the last minute and a person who simply enjoys hoping.
New Beginning
And it was all good, until the moment I had my master‘s degree. My hopes started to disappear one by one and slowly I sunk in the so called „daily routine“. I felt like time was just passing by and nothing was happening in my life. Nothing. Sounds familiar, right?
Fortunately for me, this period was not very long. My colleagues made me a wonderful present for my birthday - a book that inspired me to continue learning and start investing in myself. Thanks to these habits, I came across a very interesting idea, presented by one of my biggest idols, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Goals and Plans
Probably the biggest symbol of the American dream says that, when we want something, "the most important thing is to have a very clear goal of where we want to go, because only then we will get there. We can have the best airplane, or the best ship in the world, but if the captain doesn’t know where to go, he will just drift around. If the pilot doesn’t know where to go he will just drift around with his plane.“
These few sentences turned my idea of goals and plans 180 degrees. Wow! Arnold was so right! If we don't know where we're going, we'll always wander in our lives, like the captain at the sea and the pilot in the sky. We need a clear direction, otherwise we just go with the flow, hoping it will take us to a better place. And what is this better place and where is it located, we do not know. We just keep our fingers crossed to get there.
But I realized that there is a better strategy in life than keeping our fingers crossed for something better that awaits us somewhere, indefinitely in the future. And it inevitably includes a clear goal and a specific plan on how to achieve it.
New Direction
We can easily determine our new direction by asking ourselves the next questions:
Where do I want to be at the beginning of the next month?
Where do I want to be at the beginning of the next summer?
Where do I want to be at the end of the next year?
Time will surely pass and we will finally arrive somewhere. The question is where? And the good captain always has a clear and specific answer to this question.
So choose your direction boldly and hold the wheel with confidence, because it is only up to you, how far you will go!