Your 5-Year Vision
“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” ― Bill Gates
I agree. This is why it is super important that you start to take a longer view on life and what you want to accomplish. But before we get into that, let’s just take a moment and recognize how far we’ve come in your journey toward thinking about living a more proactive life.
In Chapter 5, we introduced you to the idea of practicing Unstoppable Sundays, as we taught you to reflect on and plan for your upcoming seven days.
In Chapter 6, we helped you zoom out and start to think about your one-year plan by answering a set of very pointed questions that help you practice gratitude, assess where you are today, and then start to lay out a plan for the next 365 days.
In Chapter 7, we introduced a new tool that you can use to become proactive about the 365 days you’re given every year, so that you can be proactive about how you spend your days and months in a given year and can make tough trade-offs on what you spend your time on versus. not.
Listen, before I set out to write this book, and before I set out to create an online course on living a more proactive life, I first became aware of the statistics:
Only 15 percent of people who purchase a course or book about making a change in their lives actually complete it.
92 percent of people who set goals never actually achieve them, according to a research study conducted at the University of Scranton.
The reality is that the world has a lot more DABBLERS than DO-ERs. A very small percentage of the population is actually ambitious. The reality is that all the statistics show that you’ll have downloaded this book, will have read parts of it, and yet you won’t make a single change in your life.
Nevertheless, here are some statistics that are even more daunting, and the reason why I still thought it was worth a shot to write this book and inspire at least 1,000 people to be more proactive in their lives:
40 million people today are suffering from anxiety,
14.8 million people are suffering from depression,
and 7.7 million people are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
In 2016 alone, the U.S. spent 446 billion dollars on medications -- almost half of the global market.
The reality is that people are hurting: They’re feeling anxiety and depression, and they’re struggling to find true meaning in their lives. And yet they struggle to take the decisive action necessary to break free. More than half of the battle, I believe, is that people aren’t given a practical framework for taking action and making changes in their lives. (That is where this book comes in.) And the other half of the battle is that your friends and your family won’t let you. (More on this in the next chapter.)
Why say all of this now? Well, if you’ve reached this chapter, or if you’ve skimmed this far ahead, that means you’ve got a chance. You’ve got a chance to be one of the select few on this planet who can break free, take decisive action, and make necessary and critical changes in your life.
And so that’s why I’m here checking in with you. Have you started to practice Unstoppable Sundays? Have you started to think about the next seven days? Have you answered some of the tough questions about what you’ve accomplished, and started to lay out goals for the next 365 days?
It’s easy to read a book. It’s easy to dabble. It’s harder to actually DO what’s necessary to make the changes and go punch your goals in the face.
But you know what’s harder? Lack. Not having enough. Or even worse, poverty.
You know what’s harder? Regret.
You know what’s even harder? Not being able to live the life that you know you deserve.
All of those things are harder. Much harder, than actually facing your reality and taking essential action to go chase down your goals.
You now have a choice to make. You have to choose between being a DABBLER and a DO-er. Will you just continue skimming through this book? Or are you going to begin work? Are you going to start taking the steps that will change your life?
The next step in your journey of becoming Unstoppable is to develop a longer view of your life. When it comes to developing a long-term, proactive view of your life, you must look at life through three lenses (zoom levels, as I like to refer to them):
How am I going to proactively spend the next week of my life? This is what Unstoppable Sundays are all about (Chapter 5).
How am I going to spend the next 365 days of my life? I go through a very specific yearly planning process to define this (Chapters 6 and 7).
And, finally: What do I want my life to look like five years from now? This is your macro view. This one is super-important, because we tend to OVERESTIMATE what we can accomplish in a year, and we tend to grossly UNDERESTIMATE what we can accomplish in five to ten years.
There’s a trick here. We first have you grab hold of your current situation by looking at seven days, and then at 365 days. Then, we’ll have you start to think about the next five years. The longer view helps you break out of the current constraints in your life and start to think about the necessary transformations you can bring over the next half-decade to full decade. As you think through this, you’ll then be able to go back to your seven-day and 365-day plans and start to tweak things. Don’t stress about making this happen all at once; just focus on the act of thinking about these three different time horizons, and as you practice Kaizen and continue to improve on your plan, it’ll start to come together beautifully. I promise.