Build Your 5-Year Vision
You’ll first answer a set of questions that helps you to reflect and learn from the five-year (similar to the one-year) exercise:
What are the things I am grateful for?
What are the things I am stressed about?
What are my key accomplishments over the past five years?
Looking back, what did I say I would accomplish in the past five years? How did this go? Are these goals still relevant?
Looking back, what are my strengths and secret powers? You’ve worked on quite a bit over the past five years: Identify the key skills and capabilities you’ve developed to a point of mastery.
Again, just as with the Unstoppable Sundays and 365-day exercises, don’t overthink it. All that is important is that you articulate your thoughts on paper (or screen), so that they’re not just percolating in your head.
Once you’ve completed these questions, you’ll have (again) gotten a great handle on just how far you’ve come from five years ago. You’ll have identified your significant accomplishments, the skills you’ve developed, and what you love spending time on versus what you’d like to do less of. Most importantly, you’ll hopefully start to realize just how much you can accomplish over the course of a five-year span.
As the final step, You’ll sit down and write out in story form (or letter form) a vision of yourself as you will be five years from now. I want you to sit and close your eyes. You today are grabbing coffee with a stranger. This stranger was introduced to you as a potential mentor who is wildly successful. A mutual friend thought the two of you should meet because you have similar values, goals, and aspirations, and she is much farther ahead and can help you.
So as you’re grabbing coffee, the stranger starts to tell you her story. How does she spend her time? What does she do? What excites her? What are the goals that she is working toward? How does she look physically?
This stranger is actually you, five years from now -- after having practiced nearly half a decade of Belief x Discipline. After nearly half a decade of Unstoppable Sundays, of planning out her years, and taking focused action in accomplishing her goals.
Write down the story of this person. Go into as much detail as possible and don’t hold back. Don’t let yourself be limited by what is possible versus what is not (because, remember, we tend to underestimate what we can accomplish in five to ten years). And keep writing until you feel an overwhelming emotion. That’s when you’ll know you’ve hit your true north about who you want to become.
As you round out your five-year vision for yourself, here are a few additional questions to ask yourself:
Does this feel true? Is there a part of this that Teenage You aspired to?
Zooming back into your one-year plan, and your next seven days, are you doing the things today that get you toward becoming this person?
What are the circumstances in your current situation that you’d need to eradicate or change in order to become a better version of yourself and closer to this vision of yourself?
What would you change about the priorities you’ve set for yourself for the next seven days to get closer to this vision? How about the next 365 days?
Use our template to work through this easily: To make it even easier to begin the practice of your five-year vision and strategy, we’ve created a simple template that you can use to get started quickly.
Much in the spirit of being proactive, you’ll use this five-year North Star to guide your decisions going forward. How will you spend your next seven days differently? How about your next 365 days? If you continue to pause and reflect on your next seven days, tweak your plan for your next 365 days, and then enrich your vision for yourself over the next 1,825 days (five years), you can not only start to develop a personal strategy for your life, but you’ll also be able to stay tethered to it and to improve it over time. Most importantly, you’ll stop being a DABBLER and you’ll become a DO-er.
Now remember what we said about this book! This book is not meant to be a piece of art that sits on your bookshelf or one that just gets forgotten. So grab a pen, and let’s work through what you’ve processed through this chapter.