CLARIFY YOUR IDEAL LIFE'S VISION.

The theme of this book is how to get from where you are to where you want to be. To accomplish this, you have to know two things—where you are and where you want to get to. Your vision is a detailed description of where you want to get to. It describes in detail what your destination looks like and feels like. To create a balanced and successful life, your vision needs to include the following seven areas: work and career, finances, recreation and free time, health and fitness, relationships, personal goals, and contribution to the larger community.
At this stage in the journey, it is not necessary to know exactly how you are going to get there. All that is important is that you figure out where there is. If you get clear on the what, the how will be taken care of.



The process of getting from where you are to where you want to be is like us-ing the navigation system with GPS (Global Positioning System) technology in a newer-model car. For the system to work, it simply needs to know where you are and where you want to go. The navigation system figures out where you are by the use of an onboard computer that receives signals from three satellites and calculates your exact position. When you type in your des-tination, the navigational system plots a perfect course for you. All you have to do is follow the instructions.

Success in life works the same way. All you have to do is decide where you want to go by clarifying your vision, lock in the destination through goal-setting, affirmations, and visualization, and start moving in the right direction. Your inner GPS will keep unfolding your route as you continue to move forward. In other words, once you clarify and stay focused on your vision (and I’ll be teaching lots of ways to do that), the exact steps will keep appearing along the way. Once you are clear about what you want and keep your mind constantly focused on it, the how will keep showing up—sometimes just when you need it and not a moment earlier.

HIGH ACHIEVERS HAVE BIGGER VISIONS

The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.
MICHELANGELO

I want to encourage you not to limit your vision in any way. Let it be as big as it is. When I interviewed Dave Liniger, the CEO of RE/MAX, the country’s largest real estate company, he told me, “Always dream big dreams. Big dreams attract big people.” General Wesley Clark recently told me, “It doesn’t take any more energy to create a big dream than it does to create a little one.” My experi-ence is that one of the few differences between the superachievers and the rest of the world is that the superachievers simply dream bigger. John F. Kennedy dreamed of putting a man on the moon. Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of a country free of prejudice and injustice. Bill Gates dreams of a world in which every home has a computer that is connected to the Internet. Buckminster Fuller dreamed of a world where everybody had access to electrical power.

These high achievers see the world from a whole different perspective—as a place where amazing things can happen, where billions of lives can be improved, where new technology can change the way we live, and where the world’s resources can be leveraged for the greatest possible mutual gain. They believe anything is possible, and they believe they have an integral part in creating it. When Mark Victor Hansen and I first published Chicken Soup for the Soul, what we call our “2020 vision” was also a big one—to sell 1 billion Chicken Soup books and to raise $500 million for charity through tithing a portion of all of our profits by the year 2020. We were and are very clear about what we want to accomplish.

If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise