What’s Your Vision?

So, do you have a vision for your life that satisfies your concept of a life well lived? How are you progressing with it? Can you articulate your goals and progress towards fulfillment? Would you like to be able to? Or are you just frustrated, confused, and unfocused? The principles of Lifelong Fulfillment allow you to take control of your life, whether you currently have a plan or not. And it works equally well for anyone just starting out in life on through retirement.

What’s In It For You?

Whether you label it happiness, fulfillment, satisfaction, or actualization, you can act genuine to your nature and calling, you can author and direct your personal achievements, and you can build strengths, tenacity, and focus. You will be in control of realizing your fondest dreams. And indicators are strong for re-envisioning your future if the any of the following are true for you,

Repeating your current history in the future doing the same old things
Forgoing opportunities, including those to research, read, self educate, or engage experts
Feeling stuck, fatigued, and leery of change, risk, and exploration
When knowing how to develop a clear vision is an unknown process
When self-knowledge is superficial

The Lifelong Fulfillment Process

The first step in defining your vision starts with getting to know yourself better. This starts with psychological profiles that identify who you are, how you think, what you value, and how these speak to your interests, relationships, and work in clear and unambiguous terms. Self assessments are enhanced by an agreement on your part to suspend any preconceived notions as to duty, religion, responsibilities, and expectations, and to concentrate on the core of who and what you are. It’s crucial to clearly articulate what you know and what you discover about yourself to define your new vision. To summarize,

Believe in your innate identity from psychology assessments
Listen to your Subconscious, your Gut, and Friends and Family Perspectives as appropriate
Decide your good lifestyle values and your risk tolerance
Inventory your Positives – Your Wants, What Makes You Happy, What Fulfills You, Your Goals, including things, people, processes, activities, and environment you hold dear
Inventory your Negatives – Don’t Wants, What Makes You Sad/Anxious/Unhappy, What Sucks You Dry, simply all the things to avoid

Next up is understanding the environment in which you live, and the hard truths about continuous change, education, the half life of explosive knowledge, personal economics, and related econometrics. This helps to detail the resources and challenges you will use to develop your vision, including,

Identifying trusted authorities to inform your vision
Climbing the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Pareto and other rules and tools that focus your process
Managing the risk in executing your plans
Improving on “what I don’t know”
Accessing your individual strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats

Now we can build and initiate plans and actions to achieve your vision. Using the information you have already acquired, you will draft a lifestyle development plan that fits your needs. The process is,

Brainstorm your Prioritized Interests, Activities, and Relationships
Evaluate the Priority Resources and Constraints
Your Priority Plan Objectives
Experiment, Test, Research, Learn
Live the Plan
- Try Things Out – whatever intrigues you, solo or with friends, keeping what works, discarding neutral or negative experiences
- It’s an Iterative and Interactive Process – Goal Setting, Experimentation, Making Friends, Learning Something New, Feedback, Revisioning
As Needed, Refresh and Revise the Objectives and Implementation to Achieve Fulfillment
Integrate Your Actual Plan Results Into Revised Objectives

*Institutions: government, schools, universities, coaches, church/synagogue/mosque, clubs, associations, boy/girl scouts, neighborhood, etc. Renaissance in Retirement, Jim Boswell, 2019

Point Solution Book Review

Why Democracies Fail – Louis Paquette, Publisher, EMERGING GROWTH STOCKS

This is by no means a new theory. At about the time America’s original 13 states adopted their new Constitution, in the year 1787, Alexander Tyler* (a Scottish history professor at The University of Edinburgh) had this to say about “The Fall of The Athenian Republic” some 2,000 years prior:

“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship.”

“The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to selfishness
From selfishness to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage” – anonymous

There’s no mystery as to why this cycle works. Poor economies force humans to adopt positive behaviors. And good economic times results in negative behaviors, to the point where it eventually brings the whole system down upon itself. And the final tragic end result every time: Bondage.

The turning point takes place is between the fifth and sixth human conditions – sometime after Abundance begins – society becomes lazy and selfish. From that point on, it’s all downhill from there.

“When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” – Benjamin Franklin