“You must be the Visionary for your own life.” - Steve Martin
In his best-selling book, Simon Sinek says, “Start with why.”
Earl Nightingale once wrote, “I like to compare human beings with ships, as Carlyle used to do. It’s estimated that about 95 percent can be compared to ships without rudders, subject to every shift of wind and tide. They’re helplessly adrift, and while they fondly hope that they will one day drift into some rich and bustling port, for every narrow harbor entrance, there are 1,000 miles of rocky coastline. The chances of their drifting into port are 1,000 to 1 against them.
But the 5 percent who have taken the time and exercised the discipline to climb into the driver’s seat of their lives, who’ve decided upon a challenging goal to reach and have fully committed themselves to reaching it, sail straight and far across the deep oceans of life, reaching one port after another and accomplishing more in just a few years than the rest accomplish in a lifetime.”
I have been fortunate in my life. I have done a lot of traveling and have seen a lot of things – the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and extraordinary works of art in the Louvre. All these things have one thing in common – as Covey pointed out, they each were created twice – first in imagination and then in reality:
A building is created in the mind of the architect before it rises into the air.
Your vacation is created in your mind before you get to enjoy it.
Your life and financial successes will be created in your mind before they become reality. Having a clear vision of where you are going is key to a successful financial plan.
While your life vision and your financial vision are not wholly separate things, I like to separate them into two different pieces to make things easier when we get to later stages of your Purposeful Financial Plan. They are very much interdependent; however, teasing out the parts of your vision that relate directly to finance forces you to be more specific, avoiding the nebulous platitudes that I described above.
The next entry will talk about the process for creating your life vision - the “why” behind your life.