Fifty years is a long time, right?
No, not so much. A surprising amount of one’s like can flash by in an instant. Without a plan, who knows where you’ll end up?
Frankly, even with a plan it’s hard to know where you’ll end up, but you might find it easier to somewhat control your path and direction, and, perhaps, feel like you’ve had a hand in your arrival at some eventual life destination.
Some plans are easy. “Let’s plan our summer vacation,” is a simple one. “Let’s plan the colonization of Mars,” is somewhat more difficult.
Big, long-term planning can be exciting. And it doesn’t have to be all that difficult. Let’s take the Mars plan, for example. Here’s mine:
Goal: establish a self-sustaining human community with over 10,000 residents living and working on the planet Mars by 2064.
Current Reality: mankind has been to the moon, briefly, 40 years ago and now can visit low Earth orbit with some difficultly. There is no large-scale consensus or support for a Mars Colony.
There. That’s it. All of the steps in-between the Current Reality to the Goal are just details. I’ll let Elon Musk worry about them. Or perhaps I’ll add a few steps of my own.
Writing a big plan doesn’t mean that your steps don’t change over time or that even the goal remains the same. They probably shouldn’t stay the same as you grow and learn more. But having the scaffolding that a plan like this represents can be helpful to keep that eventual goal within sight, to remind you why you are doing any particular task.
Make no little plans.
Today, write a plan to cover the next 50 years of your life. Make it big. But remember, this is not a binding contract. It’s a plan. Dream big.
State your eventual goal as clearly as possible. Paint a picture of that goal with words. What would that look like?
Next, briefly describe where you are today in relation to that goal. Be realistic, but not fatalistic.
And then, if you wish, add a step or to that will set you on your path.
Writing Assignment: Write A 50 Year Plan by Randy Murray, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
{ 0 comments… add one now }