People ask me sometimes how to evolve your life vision over a lifetime of pursuit and accomplishment. This is a pretty simple post I made for those of you who are a bit more advanced.
- You might have done this already before
- This might be the second third or fourth pivot you’ve made in life
- You’re just curious how you’re going to live the rest of your life with this vision you’ve discovered within you.
Here are a few points I have. I’ve gathered this information and curated it for you based on the hundreds upon hundreds of books I’ve read, lectures I’ve listened to and geniuses I’ve paid attention to who speak on this topic.
Good luck. 🙂
Read these if you haven’t already:
- How to write a personal vision statement
- Personal Vision Statement examples
- Self Discovery Exercises
- Visualization techniques for manifesting your life vision
Evolve your Vision Over a Lifetime
This might make me sound like a young cat, but have you ever seen pokemon? They evolve, but no matter what they evolve into they never forget their love for their “master” or trainer. Intrinsically, they are the same beast.
Your vision exists for one reason only, so that you can optimize yourself as a human and live the greatest possible existence you can. Everyone in the universe is connected, and you want the ripple you make in reality to be a substantial one.
Your vision, and how you achieve it will change over time, but it will always be the same.
Make sense?
How to Adapt Your Vision as Circumstances Change
Life is constantly in flux, and as it changes, how you apply your vision to daily life will also change. It’s important for you to understand how these changes may impact your goals and values. In other words, it’s essential to be perceptive to shifts in your priorities, ambitions, and life events that can affect the alignment of your vision.
Life’s twists and turns often present new opportunities and challenges, making it crucial to remain open and adaptable.
Being able to pivot and stay tuned into your values. Don’t let life changes whirl you up and confuse you.
Revising and Updating Your Vision Statement
You change, your vision changes, but not completely. You also have the option of scrapping your vision statement after it’s been achieved, and creating a new one. Visions are intrinsic to you, but it’s also your life, so don’t make a decision now that lasts forever unless it’s meant to.
Setting a schedule for this process, such as annually or when major life changes occur, keeps you on track. During these revisions, take the time to reflect on your achievements, new insights, and shifting priorities.
Consider the personal growth you’ve experienced and the wisdom gained from life’s lessons. With these reflections in mind, make the necessary modifications to your vision statement to incorporate these changes.
Your vision is not a rigid path but a flexible roadmap that evolves with you. Adapting it to reflect your changing reality ensures that it continues to inspire and guide you on your life’s journey.
Achieving Long-Term Success
Strategies for Sustaining Success Over a Lifetime
Long term success requires a formula that can consistently produce success no matter who or where you are. Sometimes results happen because variables you weren’t actively controlling just happened to match up properly.
That won’t always happen in the future, and you want to avoid getting caught with your pants down. Just because the universe matched up for you one time, doesn’t mean it always will.
You can check out this post on How to Create A Master Plan, which will show you the formula for producing consistent results over time.
In general, time tested strategies for long term success are:
- Goal Setting: Set clear, specific, and achievable goals that provide direction and motivation for your endeavors. Break these goals into smaller, manageable steps.
- Continuous Learning: Never stop learning and improving your skills and knowledge. Stay updated with industry trends and seek opportunities for personal and professional development.
- Resilience: Develop resilience to cope with setbacks and adversity. Understand that failures are learning experiences and use them to bounce back stronger.
- Consistency: Consistency is key to long-term success. Maintain a daily routine, work steadily toward your goals, and build positive habits that support your objectives.
- Adaptability: Embrace change and adapt to evolving circumstances. The ability to pivot and adjust your approach is vital for staying relevant and achieving long-term success.
- Networking: Build a strong network of relationships within your industry. Collaborate with peers, mentors, and like-minded individuals who can offer support, guidance, and opportunities.
- Time Management: Efficiently manage your time by prioritizing tasks, setting boundaries, and eliminating distractions. Make the most of your productive hours.
- Emotional Intelligence: Develop emotional intelligence to understand and manage your emotions, as well as effectively navigate social interactions. This skill is crucial in both personal and professional settings.
- Financial Savvy: Manage your finances wisely. Save and invest in a way that supports your long-term goals. Avoid unnecessary debt and make informed financial decisions.
- Strategic breaks: When something runs out of energy, it dies. You won’t always be full of it, or feeling good, but burning out to the point where you can’t go anymore doesn’t work. That being said, you can go far longer than you think you can. A healthy body and mind are essential for sustained success. Incorporate exercise, proper nutrition, and stress management into your routine.
In my own experience, some qualities that I bring to the table that have served me in any part of life are: being okay with little sleep, being harsh on yourself to produce results, having a solid morning routine, intense levels of focus, always reading (non-fiction, being smarter than everybody else still works), and not getting caught up on a million different ideas.
Leadership and Vision
Every time you listen to someone talk about something so passionately you becoming fascinated with yourself?
These insufferable people who cant shut the hell up about something have an interesting way of convincing us that the thing they’re into has some silver lining we never noticed.
How the hell am I now interested in mushrooms because this person on my instagram just gave me 296 facts about mycelia that I never knew?
Why do I suddenly care about how the Romans made bricks?
How did Steve Wallis get us all into camping?
How did Levy Rozman cause a chess boom on youtube by screaming “THE ROOOOOOKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!” in everyone’s ear each video?
Why will people sit and listen to me talk about human potential, philosophy or….bread? For 20 minutes. Have you ever thought about bread for that long?
No, but people listen to me ramble about how fascinating bread is and how I love making the same recipe over and over again each day and getting completely different results.
The thing I find most fascinating about bread are its philosophical implications.
When you set out to make bread, you’re daring to master a skill that can please anyone. All humans are satisfied by bread. And every culture has bread.
Making bread means taking something gross (flour) and turning it into something stellar with almost no help. It’s a skill that requires faith, knowledge, insanity and finesse.
When I make bread, the first thing I do is pull out a notebook.
I use Jeff Hammelmans method of figuring out the perfect temperature for the water, which everyone knows you simply take the resting temp of all the dry ingredients, and of the wet ingredients, the ambient temperature of your kitchen and then decide how hot the water needs to be so that, when you mix it into your dough, you get the precise desired temperature after mixing that the chef arrived at in his test kitchen…duh
After making an entire 8×11 sheet worth of calculations, mixing in preferences, ingredients, spices and mixing your dough (either by hand or mechanically) you can finally let your dough rest, and allow the yeast to create its own little yeast society.
They’ll start out in the prehistoric age, then move to the neolithic, generations will be born and die, evolution itself will occur in your stainless steel bowl, and you will have become a progenitor of sorts.
After a couple hours (or days) you can come back to an entire society of billions of little yeast people mulling around in their confined universe you’ve created for them. Some of them mating with other yeast, some of them cannibalizing (rather violently actually) their own, some finding a new corner of the dough world you’ve designed and created for your own divine purpose.
Some will become artists and literatures, adding their own signature flair to the flavor and experience of the dough itself. You’ll, of course, allow them to do so, not trying to infringe upon their free will because that just makes the whole bread universe better. It makes you happier, and it makes them happier to let them do things on their own.
Some will become philosophers and ponder the meaning of life, wondering why you never speak to them or whether or not you exist at all.
Everytime you poke your finger to see how the hole bounces back (trying to see if its ready for the next phase in its evolution) people will look to the sky and think its some miracle while others call those people illogical sentimental people who just need science.
But FINALLY, you’re little bread reality will finally be ready to move on. You’ll reshape it, which will undoubtedly cause a cataclysm within the reality itself. Yeast families will be separated, some will die during the reshaping, continents will move and environments will change. Where there was once a dry desert you didn’t fully incorporate will now be a moderately tempered woodland environment. Entire species in this reality will have to adapt, or die.
And they will. A few more generations (or an hour of your time) later, the final act. Time for the bread to go into the oven. A wonderful few billion years of yeast time destroyed in hellfire. It’s a crescendo of agony and pain as you take a once serene and peaceful species of yeast organisms, stick them in your oven, heat their entire world up to a very uninhabitable temperature.
Can you hear them screaming and running for their lives? In a desperate attempt to save their species, the yeast will spread, move like crazy around the dough while in the oven and reproduce like never before.
But, being the cynical god you are, you’ve flooded the surface of their world with moisture as you spray the surface of the bread to create a nicer, more flavorful outer layer and to produce oven bloom, which will eventually climax in their bread world exploding at its weakest points (perhaps those points be scars you inflicted yourself?).
The scientists of this world have finally saved their species though, and figured a way off this you forsaken bread behemoth that’s burning in your ovens supernova of destruction and hell, but right as they make their attempt you vent the steam in your oven, stopping oven bloom, and commencing crust formation, trapping them in the genocidal, sadistic environment you’ve designed at their expense, for your own pleasure….
…and then, you slice that world open and consume all their dead corpses. That’s what bread is.
Basically what I’m saying is, if you can talk about something the way I just spoke about bread, people will think you’re crazy, but most importantly, they’ll listen.
Vision inspires you, and you inspire them. They rally behind it and you win.
Easy, kind of.
Measuring Progress
Self explanatory. Use apps and softwares like evernote, asana and todoist to track your progress. If you’re an analog person, like me, get a journal or a regular notebook to make sure you record everything you can. Journals give you data on your journey and data brings perspective, which is priceless.
Mentoring and Coaching
Would you rather be self taught or just have someone with a decade of experience tell you what to do? Stupid question, but some people still opt for doing everything on their own. So what does that make them? Stupid.
I’m one of those stupid people. When blogging blew up in 2016, I was broke, had no money for courses or programs, and I didn’t know what to do, when to do it, or how. To my credit, I’ve always been ambitious with a stop at nothing attitude. Plus, I’m resourceful and can generally figure things out on my own…so I did.
When people tell me “Oh I’ll just figure it out by myself I’ll be fine.”, my response is “I know you will.” Then I walk away.
You’d think I would say the opposite, but I don’t, because the opposite isn’t true. I know there are people out there, just like me, who have what it takes to do whatever needs to be done to get the thing done.
I know some of you can piece together a master plan (somehow) from a million free trainings and free ebooks and white papers.
I also know that doing that requires much more time, energy and life force (our precious but limited resource) than just asking someone for help and…
…yes, if you ask someone with years and years upon more years of experience to literally catapult you to the finish line with their expertise…they’re gonna want you to pay for it.
People have three currencies:
- Time
- Gratitude
- And money.
When I lived in the monastery, that old swami didn’t need anything from me. So, in exchange for his knowledge, I said thank you, scrubbed the toilets and cleaned up after his cows. I made him lunch, I cleaned the temple, I delivered the milk, hauled the cow dung down the mountain, and paid the bills. Everything.
There might be a time when you literally have nothing valuable to offer someone because they have so much in life already. At that point, you might receive their mercy and they give you something they know you can never return, simply because of the size of their heart, or how pitiful of a condition you’re in.
But if you can’t offer someone your time, or immeasurable gratitude, you better be prepared to open your wallet and give that man what he deserves…OR you can be a moron and figure it all out on your own – which, in the case of blogging, took me years and years.
Nothing is free, and nothing should be free. Nobody should ever give you anything and be at a deficit afterwards. Unless you’re ungrateful, you should be willing to offer them something of value, and, in most cases, that’s money. Preach.
I’m not necessarily an expert on finding mentors right now. They just seem to phase in and out of my life when I need them. When I have a system for finding mentors, I’ll update this post for you.
One thing I will say is that Tai Lopez, on the topic of mentors, one said that mentors often see a good investment, someone who’s not a waste of their time, who will take them seriously and continue the legacy on – often they see something in the mentee that reminds them of themselves when they were younger.
Kindred spirits I guess.
High Octane Humans and their Visions
We can just rattle off a bunch of commonly referenced people for a few minutes.
Oprah Winfrey, who rose from adversity to become a media mogul and philanthropist, inspiring millions with her influential talk show and unwavering dedication to philanthropy.
Then there’s Elon Musk, who redefined transportation and space exploration, fueling his vision for a sustainable and multi-planetary future through companies like Tesla and SpaceX.
J.R.R. Tolkien created Middle-earth, a compelling and influential fantasy realm, even amidst the challenges of World War I, leaving an indelible mark on the world of literature.
Vincent van Gogh, with his emotional use of color, overcame personal struggles to innovate art and create timeless masterpieces like “Starry Night.” Nikola Tesla’s vision reshaped electrical engineering, introducing alternating current (AC) electricity and contributing to wireless communication, revolutionizing power distribution and communication systems.
Florence Nightingale’s legacy in modern nursing practices, emphasizing cleanliness and patient care, has significantly impacted healthcare worldwide.
Cesar Chavez’s vision led to the fight for farmworkers’ rights, co-founding the United Farm Workers union and orchestrating nonviolent protests to improve working conditions, leaving a powerful legacy of social justice.
Isaac Newton’s vision brought forth the laws of motion and universal gravitation, revolutionizing physics and shaping the course of scientific inquiry.
Thomas Edison, in his pursuit of harnessing electricity, gave us the phonograph, the practical electric light bulb, and a slew of transformative devices, shaping the modern world and the electrical industry.
Lastly, Robin Williams’ multifaceted vision encompassed entertainment, using humor to connect with people, advocating for social causes, raising awareness about mental health, and supporting and inspiring fellow comedians and actors.
Common Elements of Success
These success stories share common elements.
- They all possessed an unwavering belief in their visions, irrespective of the challenges they encountered.
- They were also exceptional problem solvers, adapting to changing circumstances and refining their visions when needed.
- Resilience played a crucial role, as they persisted through setbacks and adversities.
- Their ability to communicate their visions effectively to others and build strong support networks contributed to their achievements.
Apply these lessons to your own pursuit.
