A Preview of Life's Coming Attractions

I want to put up a description of my future scenario so that when I achieve it I will look back and go WOW I did it!

So here it is. My three year plan. (Reduced the timeline from the five year plan) I have created a reasonably successful business so that I have income coming in to support my lifestyle. Trivia Party Starters. Maybe. When winter comes, November or late October, I head to warm places. Choices include a condo rental on the beach at Madeira Beach, Arizona or Hawaii (Kona is my first love). I prefer the beach. My pleasure is to spend two hours a day walking/running on the beach with Audi. Then go for coffee at the local coffee shop. I have a Blackberry and a laptop and a Kindle to stay in touch with everything/everyone. I will work at the business for two hours a day and have one person here in Guelph to keep the business day to day. I will spend 3-4 months there and then go to Europe and rent by the sea for a couple of months a year. (It is surprisingly cheap to rent monthly in the small towns far from the maddening crowd.) Drink wine in the places where wine was born and read endless books on Kindle while watching the water. Tour around on a bicycle and enjoy the culture. Train it to Paris or Rome for a couple of days. Spend summer at the cottage. Not sure if Sandra would rent the cottage out for two months June and July.

I am doing my PhD online through Walden U and enjoying the content immensely.(Psychology)

I travel to China and teach English for a semester or two. I build a house with Habitat for Humanity. Spend a week at Kilimanjaro and climb to the summit. Three days at the North Pole to see the Northern Lights. The pyramids in Egypt and a hike through the Sahara. Descend into a shark cage and see them up close and personal. Take yoga classes in Asia. Cooking lessons in Thailand, Greece, France and Italy. Running on the Great Wall of China. Learning to sail in the Mediterranean.

I have a philanthropic side to the business that helps educate young girls in third world countries so they do not get married so young. I feel good about that and the more product I sell, the more girls who will attend school and find out who they can be.

It is all possible and affordable on a normal income if you can be mobile and still earn that income. The other thing I think about is missing friends and family and I know they will come over to share these amazing moments with me. And I will be back regularly to share simple times. I will send my kids a ticket while they are in University to join me where the mood strikes them.

Sounds like the impossible dream. When you do the math it does not seem impossible. This blog entry becomes my roadmap. Napolean Hill says "Your burning desire is nothing more than an accurate picture of what you will one day become". Einstein says that "Imagination is the preview of life's coming attractions". This is what I will one day become. I have already begun the trek but the road ahead is still foggy and the destination not obvious to me. But I am moving step by step.

Carpe Diem

I am at the cottage with a group of friends who have been friends since high school. We have moved in and out of each others lives but never too far away. Throughout the 35 or so years that we have known each other we have shared moments and sadness and illness and joy and lots of wine. Remarkably we are all still here. We came up to this cottage before our children were born and now we are here and the children have moved on. For many years in between we shot photos each year as the kids grew and this year we won't. It is not sad just the way it is. There is a new life for all of us now and we need to Seize The Day.

Fear. Doubt. Happiness. Boredom.

Normally we think the opposite of happiness is sadness. Here is a new idea. What if the opposite of happiness is actually boredom instead of sadness? The opposite of love is indifference instead of hate? These thoughts come from Tim Ferriss and the longer you think about them the more interesting they become. Boredom is unhappiness. The times when I feel the most unhappy are the times when there is nothing to stimulate my mind and body. When I stretch to reach new goals I feel the happiest. When I leave my comfort zone behind I feel anxious and uncomfortable. When I push through this feeling even on small tasks, I feel the elation of having accomplished something hard; of stretching the envelope and learning new skills.

Last year I was working on this project and one thing went wrong and I immediately packed it all up and put it away. I have reopened the project now about a year later and have moved way past that one thing that went wrong and now when I look back I cannot believe it was a showstopper for me. It has faded to a small insignificant detail. That kind of retrospect lets me look at the issues that seem to loom now and when I think about it I know that they too will shrink to become insignificant with time and action that helps me move around them.

I act in spite of fear and doubt. My current mantra. It works.

Time, Mobility, Money (In That Order!)

I narrowed down to a list of 4 values with my Coach. I had to start by defining 30 values. I was stuck at 6. When I finally had a list of 30 and had to choose my 5 most important ones, I had trouble letting some of them go. Here are the 4 I chose and as I look at them now, they truly represent where I stand right now.

• Personal Power defined as strength, belief in myself, clarity.
  
• Authenticity defined as friendship, trust and being my authentic self.
  
• Continuous Learning defined as Knowledge, Achievement and Trying New Things.
  
• Freedom defined as Adventure, Choice and Variety.
  

Tim Ferriss of The 4-Hour Work Week defines the new goals of increasing time and mobility now rather than waiting for some vague retirement time which may not come. He discusses automating your cash flow so you can finance your mobility and use your free time to try new things. I like how he turns the old "Work until you can Retire" model on it's head. He makes me think differently and see possibilities in a model for life that I had never even considered. He shows you how to go now.

His principles align perfectly with my values. Sychronicity.

Two Things and Five Things

Two things I learned this week. Waiting is my way of procrastinating. If I am waiting for an answer from someone else, I am not responsible to act. By knowing this I can move past it. When I am about to make the most challenging step on a path to a goal, I tend to ask questions of others and then spend time waiting for the answers. It keeps me from having to take the big step.

The second thing I learned was to keep on trying when I was not getting the result I needed. (Hmmm that's new!) I reached a wall on a project that I was working on and I just kept calling to get another opinion until one person provided me with the lead I needed to move on to the next step. As a result, I made a huge leap toward the goal.

Just putting words onto these behaviors helps me to grow past them.

Jack Canfield says to do 5 things each day that move you towards your goal. I like that idea. 5 things a day for a year is more than 1800 things done to achieve your goals. Imagine contacting 5 PR sources for your business. Imagine contacting 5 people that can assist with production. Imagine meeting with a mentor each week to keep your momentum going. Do one thing to move you towards production of a prototype. Build your website. Have labels created. Have bar codes registered for your product. Contact 5 web sites that will carry your product. Contact 5 stores that might carry your product. 5 more things each day until one day you are looking back at what you have accomplished. Victorious retrospect.

A Series of Small Steps

When you have a big idea, it is exciting and motivating. Then you begin the actual execution of the tasks to make your idea become real. These are banal tasks that are seemingly unrelated to the exhiliaration of the goal. That makes them hard to do. Do them anyway. I have experienced this sequence before and it leads directly to the goal by completing one task and moving on to the next one. Some of the tasks are difficult and new. Some of them feel like showstoppers. Go around them. There is a new path just beyond.

I had dinner with a friend last night and she started a very successful business doing what she loves. She said when she is working she feels like this is exactly what she should be doing. She tried to think of her ideal life and what it would look like. And she says her ideal life and her real life are the same. What an achievement. We should all be that focussed.

Optimism

Nancy Davis wrote a book about optimism and MS. I ordered it immediately. I am frighteningly optimistic in thinking I can control this strange disease. I balk at the word disease as I type it. I refuse to think of it as a disease but rather just another thing that I can manage within my list of priorities. A little self deception? Maybe. Whatever gets you through the night. An attack could suddenly change my life. But I can also get hit unexpectedly by a bus. Could result in the same outcome. Yet....I do not worry about being hit by a bus. I will not worry about this as there is little affect that will have on my outcome.

Here is what the knowledge of a possible attack of MS should do. It should make me re-evaluate what I am doing with the precious minutes and days that I have available. Am I doing the things that I enjoy or am I doing the things that people my age do. I think it is the latter and I am making it the former. So....now armed with my list of things I want to do, I am carving out a new lifestyle for myself. “Every adversity and defeat carries the seed of an equivalent benefit, if we are ingenious enough to find it.”

This should not be an exercise related to an MS diagnosis but one which we should all do to create the life of our dreams. Ask yourself if you are you who you dreamed you would be when you were young? The answer to that will probably be "no". But the achievement of that is not beyond our reach. So how can we gradually change our lives to become who we had hoped to be. We all need to feel the momentum of new goals that we stretch towards and feel the victory of reaching new levels of ability in every area of our lives.

"The difference between stumbling blocks and stepping stones is all in how you use them."

We all have precious time left and we want to be sure to do the things that make our hearts sing. Today, not someday.