Five Simple Steps
For A Life Well Lived

How can you design a life that in retrospect can be considered a life well lived?

Obviously, no singular pattern defines all the options, but it is possible to speak in broad, sweeping ways about five simple steps that can create a sense of direction.

Create A Vision Map For A Life Well Lived

Gather up your favorite magazines, pull out your scissors, and hold your glue stick ready. Flip through the pages of your magazines, find positive, uplifting, inspiring, dream-evoking images, and cut out the pictures that will represent your life.

Seek what is good, true, and beautiful for you, then with a broad stroke splatter the images and ideas, keywords and koans, letters and lust across a big piece of cardboard.

Avoid the systematic, uphold the haphazard. Vision Maps fall in the realm of magic when they leap over the constraints of the logical mind. In short, embrace the random, play rather than work at this process.

Draw Up A Life List For A Life Well Lived

Write 100 things that fire your imagination. Classify them as things you would like to be, things you would like to do, and things that you would like to have. Do not rush this list, but let it evolve organically, percolating in your mind through the course of days and nights.

Choose Starter Goals For A Life Well Lived

Select one or four items on your list of 100 and create specific, measurable, actionable, and time-bound goals around them. If you’re monomaniacal, love focus, choose one. If you’re easily bored with too much predictability, pick four; enough to give you variety, but few enough to keep you on task.

Launch Micro-actions For A Life Well Lived

With goals in place, its easy to feel displaced. Alarmed by the possibility that things may actually improve for the better in your life, you may be a real expert in finding ways to postpone taking action. Conversely, if you do have the courage and enthusiasm to take massive action, you may burn more like a roman candle rather than a cigar. Once you burn out, you may find a sneaky way to make a rest break a jail break.

The way to avoid alarming the status quo of your subconscious mind, which likes to keep you safe by keeping things the same, no matter how dysfunctional they may be, is to be subtle and to take small steps, baby steps. Once you get into the habit of being action-oriented, you can pick up the pace and surge forward with a new momentum.

Persist In Envisioning A Life Well Lived

Envision your future every single day. You can do this first thing upon waking up or last thing before dropping off to sleep. Alternatively, you can set aside 10 minutes a day to meditate on your vision of your fondest hopes for yourself.

Intention is everything. It births worlds of hope, sustains planets of desire in their orbits, and manifests dreams in the universe.

This Is Easy!

Can these five simple steps really help you live a life you truly enjoy? Yes, simply because they give you a clear, unique vision and inspire the mental and physical actions you need to take to move in a direction that has the most meaning for you.

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