Beginning Your Adventures

"Begin your adventures as early as you can.  I promise you, you will not get burned out.  It actually becomes the most enjoyable way to spend time on Earth, as opposed to just pacing the cage."   Jimmy Buffett, A Pirate Looks at Fifty

 

Common 'wisdom' is that you have to put off your adventures until retirement.  (And when I say adventures, I'm talking about doing what you want to do.)  Our philosophy is a bit different, adventures begin when you are in your prime and ready to have those adventures, and you define when that is - not the media, not the government and not those with 'common' wisdom.  Your prime can be when you're in your 20's and you're physically prime.  Your prime may be in your 70's when you're mentally and experientially prime.  Or perhaps you'll decide that you can have several primes, or many.

 

There is a fallacy that we must first work and then have our adventures.  The adventures must wait.  With today's technology and some lifestyle choices, that is no longer the route necessary.  Just because somebody says you must work and then retire, doesn't make it so.  You can have your adventures throughout your life or you can have them early on and then work at something you love.

 

And also, just because someone says you must retire and sit in a rocking chair at 65 (or 68 or whatever 'they' say these days) doesn't mean you have to do that either.   You could have some adventures and then do something that you find really interesting, that perhaps brings in an income.  With the internet, no one knows whether you're 10 or 90.  That age discrimination you would encounter in an office doesn't exist behind a computer screen.

 

Have your adventures, have your work, have both - in the order that you choose.

Dream Vampires

As you think about and start to put together your plans for your ideal lifestyle, you start to get really excited about them.  The whole business is very exciting!  You get so excited that you want to share those plans with the folks you know and the folks you love.  Let me give you a tip here, DON'T!  Do-not-do-this!  If you want to have the wind taken out of your sails faster than you can say big dream, share your vaguely formulated dream with someone you know and listen as they 'helpfully' tear your dream to shreds, 'kindly' providing you with all of their insights into how your dream cannot possibly work.

 

Actually many of the people you know and love won't do that (at least not intentionally), but a few will and as they are tearing your dream to shreds, your motivation melts away at the same time.  There may be no malice in them at all and they may truely believe they are being helpful, but some people just don't 'get' dreams.They are so down to earth and practical, dreaming doesn't make sense to them.  Either way, intentional or not, they suck the life out of your dreams and leave you holding a hollow shell.  I call them Dream Vampires, avoid them like the plague!

 

Share your dream very carefully because when it is in its infancy (especially if this is your first foray into living your dreams) it is very delicate.  It is not fully formed, the whys and whyfores are not completely thought out, all the t's have not been crossed and the i's dotted, you don't know how it's all going to work - you're just at the beginning, for goodness sake!  And if at this stage you are grilled, 'But what about this?' 'Have you thought about that?' 'How's this going to work?' and 'Oooohhh, I don't think that's a very good idea', you might lose confidence and run right back to your safe little house, TV, mall, or cubicle.  Dream Vampires suck away your confidence, your energy and enthusiasm.  That is NOT what you need at this stage of the game!

 

Plan and discuss your dream and your plan with your partner, if you're a pair.  If you're a singleton, is there someone who always supports your ideas and who just thinks you're wonderful?  That's the person to bounce your new thoughts and visions off of.  And during Dream Infancy, your dream is your own special secret, not ready to be shared with a wider audience yet.

 

Stay away from the Dream Vampires until you're fully protected, until your dreams move out of infancy, when you have a complete (and perhaps cast in stone) plan for how you're going to move to your ideal lifestyle and maybe you've even already done many of the steps in the plan.  If you're already on your way, it's easy to just ignore the Dream Vampires!

Dream Delivery System

In yesterday's post we talked about your Red Book, an approach for defining and planning out how you will achieve your dreams. Like many planning activities, there is often a great deal of enthusiasm around the initial plan, but then time passes and your wonderful plan slips away, only to be thought of with guilt for not doing anything more with it. That's why this approach is not just about creating a plan, but also about how you work the plan until you reach your dreams.

But, by the way, there is power in just going through the planning process and turning your mind to what you want. I went to a financial planning seminar many years ago and one of the night's exercises was to write down ten things we wanted to accomplish financially. I got busy with other things and tossed the list in a drawer, didn't take a look at it until five years later. Guess what? Every single thing on that list had been accomplished!

So we've already got even more omph that simply writing a list and tossing it in a drawer with the first part of the Red Book Process. The next part is to ensure that you rapidly and consistently progress towards your goals. Here's how to 'Work' the Red Book after you've come up with your plan:

1.) Put 12 meetings in your diary for you (and your partner). This is one to two hours per month for thinking, discussing and planning what you have done and what you will do next in moving towards achieving your dreams. Make the meeting in a special place where you can talk and spend a couple hours uninterrupted.
2.) Bring your Red Book and your To-Do List(s). And when I say To-Do List, I am talking about your Work To-Do list. Yes, I want you to put your personal stuff on your work to-do list! Why? Because your work to-do list is the one you focus on, put the most importance on and get the most things done on, why wouldn't you put your the most important activities of your life (achieving your dreams) on there too?
3.) Have a cup of coffee and go through each of the items under each of the categories, discuss and check off the things that you have done, enjoy what you have accomplished so far. Each and every check gets you closer to your goals
4.) Look at each of the items under each of the categories, what needs to be done next? Assess, is it something we can do during the coming month? Break each task down into something that can be done in 15 minutes or less (we can always find 15 minutes, right?!). Decide who will do it and put it on that person's To-Do List.
5.) Make sure the next meeting is in both of your diaries!

This monthly meeting is the key to making progress, along with putting your 'Dream Delivery' activities on your work to-do list and breaking the tasks down into 15 minute chunks. Steve always says that we over estimate what we can do in a day and under estimate what we can do in a year, and we've found that to be very true. Each month you'll see the progress that you've made (even if it is just one little thing!) which will motivate you to do more - you're making progress, that's exciting!

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.

It Doesn't Just Magically Happen

As we go through our busy day-to-day lives, we work to make sure that the job gets done, we work to make sure that the errands get run, we work to make sure that the house and car get taken care of. But for some reason, we don't work to ensure that we get to do the things we really want to do in life, we don't work to ensure that we have the time and ability to live out our dreams.

Now I'm not sure why mowing the lawn or going to Home Depot should take priority over getting whatever one's dream lifestyle is. But it seems to. I don't know why going to the mall happens more frequently than defining, planning and achieving one's dreams, but it does. Perhaps it is prioritisation - those things need to be done NOW whereas living out one's dreams, oh, that will happen 'someday'.

Unfortunately, it doesn't magically happen, we don't suddenly wake up one day and find ourselves living out our dreams and doing the things that make us happy. Unfortunately, some of us do wake up and realise we missed out - we're too old, family demands are too important, the stock market went kaput and we don't have the money anymore. We thought our dreams would take care of themselves and magically appear someday, and they didn't.

Most of the magic I know is sleight of hand and actually that takes a lot of work too. Achieving one's dreams does take time and effort, they don't magically happen. But most of the things we do in life take time and effort, the difference is the results that you get with the time that we 'spend'. The time and effort you spend going to the mall and running errands results in nil, no gain, status quo unchanged (or epending on how much money you spend, status quo reduced!). The time and effort you invest on achieving your dreams results in step-by-step progress closer and closer to your goals, each step improving one's status quo and results in you doing the things you want to do with your life.

Aren't your dreams worth investing some time in?

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