3 steps to achieve success and fulfillment in life
First: Define your future This step involves three key components: Create a clear vision. See the future you wish you to arrive as clearly as possible. Once you know it and once you see it, don’t ever change it but see it every day. Define your goals. Breakdown your vision into tangible and measurable goals. Design a roadmap: Build a strategy to get there. (change it along the way as you get more experienced) Second: Transform who you are You won’t get to a new external reality in your life unless you change internally first. So the first step toward a new future is to have a new you. You need to work on the following based on your vision, goals, and strategic plan: Your belief system and your core values Your habits and rituals The people around you Third: Execute your plan and achieve your goals This is both the hard part and the fun part. Usually, the people who are good at step one, are not so good at this step. So even if you are not good, you need to change this in step two and become great at execution otherwise you will be stuck at steps one and two forever. If you complete steps one and two successfully, this step becomes easier and more fun.
The power of belief
“Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.” William James Your beliefs are the source of your attitude. When you believe your life is a gift that you should embrace and get the best out of it, your attitude prompts you into action and your actions result in a life you dreamed about. Re-build your beliefs and you can rebuild your life.
On traveling the journey of life
What is life? Life is a journey that starts with your birth and ends with your death. Within this journey, you experience your own existence in an unknown world. This is the reason you are born with the ability to learn, with a strong sense of curiosity and a passion to discover more and more about your world. You are the center of this world and the more you know about it the more you enrich your experience. The most important mission of your life is to stay alive so your period of experience in this world extends longer and longer and what comes naturally is that you just love every moment of it and appreciate this amazing experience. Your experience gives you a variety of sensations that you receive through your five senses. You feel pain, you feel pleasure, you feel love, you feel a connection, you feel fear, you feel envy, you feel joy and the list goes on and on. As you grow, your mind grows and this gives you the ability to expand the level of your experience and even go beyond what is surrounding you at the moment. You can think of the past and enjoy or suffer from the memories of it, your imagination can help you to think about the possible future and what you wish it to be. You learn to see things that don’t exist now but existed in the past or might exist in the future. And by this capacity, you improve the level of your experience and enhance your life further. Life and death We naturally fear death. This fear of death prompts us to take action and do something for our survival. But death is the best thing about life. It puts a cap on the time we have. It reminds us that we need to value our time as the most precious thing we have and to use it only for the most important things. Death also teaches us that there is an end to everything both good and bad, both pain and pleasure. While fear of death is natural and has been the best alarm to keep us alive, obsessing and worrying about death is not natural and it is a creation of our mind. Now we don’t fear dying at just this moment so we should do something about it to avoid the actual danger in front of us, but we are afraid of dying eventually. This fear is not helpful but harmful. We are afraid of what is inevitable. Natural fear is when we fear something that we don’t know if it’s happening or not. That uncertainty about the risk makes us do something about it and avoid the risk from happening. We might fight or flight (escape). But we are naturally not afraid of the inevitable. We embrace it. So we created a new type of fear, and now we have learned wrongly to fear something such as death as if by fearing we may become immortal. Love: “Would you become a pilgrim on the road of love? The first condition is that you make yourself humble as dust and ashes.” (Rumi) Love is the most amazing and best gift of life. As humans, we have the capacity to love and crave to be loved. This capacity connects us to each other and even to other things. With love, we can go as deep as we want and still there is more to go. When we proactively love, we make it an art. We learn how to connect and give and receive and bring warmth to our hearts and to our lives. With love, everything we experience gets much more interesting. The purpose of life: We have developed a culture to seek purpose for life. We wrongly seek reasons to live; some of us go out of our ways to find what our life is about. While we seek to find a complicated and strange meaning for life, we forget to look at it differently and see that the answer is as simple as this; the purpose of life is to live it, to be, to exist, and to experience it, to appreciate everything about it and to thrive in it. Yes, life is a journey and it’s our journey and despite that, we didn’t choose to begin it and we don’t have a choice but to end it one day, as long as we are alive, we have the choice to live it so we should live it. Giving and taking: As living things, we are both destined to take and give. We don’t have a choice in this but to do both. All living things do so. This taking and giving make us part of the eco-system that we live in. For example, we eat food but we are a great source of food for other creatures and eventually, we will be completely consumed by other creatures. But as human beings, we have developed a culture to take and give beyond what other living things do. We are part of the human family and from the time that we are born, we receive things such as protection, food, education, love and intimacy and so many other things from our family, friends, and the rest of the society. As we receive, there is an obligation to give. By giving we complete this cycle and we appear more natural, we enjoy our being among others and we feel there is a meaning to our life. Listening to our inner voice: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.” – Steve Jobs Some of us are lucky enough to find our passion meets our talents and we find that what we give can be focused on a specific area and it takes shape as a mission of life. We are not happy just for small
Happy now and you are happy in the future
A happy person generates happiness in his or her surroundings. Happiness is contagious and while it makes people around you feel better, it improves the possibilities of a better future as well. Dr. Daniel Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence explains the feeling of happiness as following: “Among the main biological changes in happiness is an increased activity in a brain center that inhibits negative feelings and fosters an increase in available energy, and a quieting of those that generate worrisome thought. But there is no particular shift in physiology save a quiescence, which makes the body recover more quickly from the biological arousal of upsetting emotions. This configuration offers the body a general rest, as well as readiness and enthusiasm for whatever task is at hand and for striving toward a great variety of goals”. The state of happiness is now but what is interesting is that when you are happy your brain prepares you for working on your future. This means that the more you invest with your time, money and energy to live a happy present, the more you are capable of moving toward a better future.