Map Your Future, Part II

Map Your Future, Part I, was a good first step in setting your life on the path you choose. You may remember that I asked you to:

1. Assess your current situation
2. Rate your satisfaction with your current situation
3. Chart your course

Step 3 was left vague on purpose, because I think it is really important to take your time to do a great job on truly understanding the present before working on the future. So, if you haven't completed the exercises in Part I, please do before continuing to Part II.
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At this point, you should have a very intimate understanding of your current life (net worth, career, living situation, relationships, etc.) You should also be quite clear on how you feel about each part of your life.

If you've already created a collage of your dreams, like we discussed in Visualize Your Goals, you also have a grip on what you want in life.

The trick is connecting those dots. How can we shape our present into our future? One popular strategy is to sit and wait. Many (most?) people choose this method. They figure they have a nice job and a savings account, so the pieces will probably fall into place. Can this blindfolded approach to life really work? Can it be satisfying! I can't imagine how. Let's take control of our present and our future!

Here's how...

1. Open Microsoft Word and create a new document.
   
2. Turn on bullets or numbering.
3. Bullet One: Write a short, simple description of your current status, i.e. net worth, job, house, relationships... Be brief. No need to reinvent the wheel, since you've already studied this in depth.
   
4. Bullet Two: Write a similar description of what you want in the future (I chose the age of 50). Again, use your dream collage as a guide, but no need to spell everything out again.
   
5. Between One and Two, enter a new Bullet Two. Here, you write an intermediate stage. A broad "how." A milestone.
6. Now continue to inject new bullet points. If it isn't clear how one fits with the next; write another, smaller milestone between them. Or copy-paste them around the page.
1. Tab in to create mini-billets for tasks that need to be broken up into smaller milestones.
   
7. Be sure to be more detailed toward the top of the page. These are actionable items you can be working on NOW!

Save this document so you can come back to it later. Ideally, you can add things to your daily, weekly, or monthly to-do lists which have direct correlation with your deepest goals. Aren't those the things we want to be working on anyway?