Oh, But You're Different, You Have...

...so much time, so much money, so much more energy - rubbish! When we started, we didn't have anything more than anyone else and to tell the truth, we actually started in a worse off position than most. We didn't have more money, certainly didn't have more time, we're not significantly more energetic than most, and there are a whole lot of people out there who are smarter than we are. But there is one thing that we have and use that most people don't, The Red Book.

The Red Book for us is actually a red book, but it is also our approach to life planning and dream achievement - a way to define, work towards and achieve what you've been dreaming about, in a way that is eminently doable. We've found it to be a great tool for rapidly achieving our goals and also for strengthing our relationship. Much of it is commonsense and uses things that you hear about, but the approach for 'working' the Red Book is different and effective. In six years it has enabled us to acquire three houses, launch a successful consulting business, get an MBA from Duke, visit 20 countries, motorbike 20,000 miles around Europe, find and fix up our sailboat, 'retire' at 46 and 48 with a self-sustaining income, and spend our time sailing around the Bahamas. It is simple to put together and easy to use, sound interesting?

Today's post is Part I, Creating the Red Book. 'Working' the Red Book will follow. Okay, here's how it works:

1.) Get yourself a book (it can be red or not, but make it a nice one), this is the place where you're going to put all your dreams and your plans for achieving them. It's a very important book
2.) Set aside some uninterrupted thinking time, and I am talking somewhere in the neighborhood of 1-3 days. We typically do this around New Year's Day or during our holiday / vacation. Long weekends are good for this too.
3.) If you have a partner, you both must do this together (and if you've ever tried to reach a goal when your partner isn't involved, doesn't understand or isn't bought into it and achieved a stunning lack of progress, you'll understand why!). If you're a singleton, this piece of work will be shorter and involve less negotiation.
4.) With your partner, define the six to eight most important 'Categories of Your Life'. Some examples are Relationship, Children, Family, Health, Finances, Travel, Personal Growth, etc. These categories must be agreed upon by the two of you. Don't just rush to the sample categories I've listed, really think and talk about what is important to you - and they can be things that are not currently present in your life, new is okay.
5.) Once you have defined / agreed upon your categories, it is time to think about the contents of those categories. For each one, ask this question, 'If this could be great, what would it be like?' If our relationship was great, what would it be like? If our finances were great, what would they be like? Make a list of all those things for each category.
6.) There are some rules which come into play at this point, everyone's dreams are okay, a person's dreams are their dreams - no one's is better than another. This is not the place for judgement or criticism.
7.) Think about / discuss the interesting things that are emerging during the questioning and list making. Although the fear when embarking on this may be that the list will be too long and you won't be able to do it all, typically that does not happen in Year 1. Bigger and more dreams tend to emerge as you get used to using the Red Book and gain confidence in your ability to achieve your dreams with this approach.
8.) When the lists of 'how it could be great' are complete for each category, it is time to refine them and select / agree which things you will do for this year. We do discuss and look at things over a longer horizon, and plan for them, but keeping the activities to this year makes it immediate and somehow doable. If something is three years out, you don't really have to do anything about it, do you?
9.) This is NOT the time to be a martyr and say, 'Oh, fine, if that's what you want (big sigh). It is not time to criticize the dreams, it is time to build upon them. The rule here is you cannot say, 'I don't like that' to any of the ideas, you MUST come up with a better one if you are not comfortable with the idea as it stands (and I think this may be a core difference in this approach to dream development and planning). If a dream / goal doesn't work for you, you must come up with a better one. this is hard to do and this is where it takes a lot of time because we are so used to creating win/lose situations and have very little practice creating win/win situations - but for you both to get excited and want to do this, it must be a win/win.
10.) Once you've agreed your lists, take a break, do something else for a while and let the list percolate for a bit. Do any new thoughts or ideas emerge? Is there any goal that still needs to be worked on to make it right for both of you?
11.) For each item in each category, write down the high level things that you must do to make it happen.
12.) What are the things on that list that you can do now or in the next few days? Launch your plan, make it start, make it real and do them!

The next step is to 'Work' the Red Book over the course of the coming year and continuously complete the activities which move you closer to your dreams, we'll talk about that in an upcoming post.