We’ve all been there: Scatterbrained and launching from one activity into another. Maybe you decide you want to be an artist one day and an engineer the next. Maybe you decide you want to be a musician, start researching how to read music, get burned out and spend the rest of the afternoon scrolling through TikTok on your phone.
Unfortunately, it’s easy to get derailed when you haven’t prioritized your life goals. But if you set aside just a couple of days to think through what you most want in life, then you can start working toward creating priorities. These priorities will help you create a daily schedule, navigate your life and achieve your goals.
However, it’s natural if you’re at a loss of where to start. Just how can you start prioritizing your goals? How can you find your life’s purpose? These are questions we answer below.
Visualizing Your Ideal Life
It’s almost impossible to prioritize your goals if you don’t currently have a vision for your ideal life. To determine what tasks you should do first, you need to know what’s most important. For example, if you decide that your higher calling is to become a writer, the first thing you should do when you wake up isn’t to scroll on Reddit looking for quick-dopamine rushes in the form of funny memes.
Imagination exercise:
- Find a quiet space all to yourself. If your home is typically bustling and busy, you may want to go to a coffee shop or outdoors in the park.
- Keep a notebook and something to write with near you.
- Close your eyes and start imagining what you’d want in an ideal life. And don’t hold yourself back by being realistic. If you want a mansion and an indoor basketball court, put that in your vision.
- Think about what you want to be known for. Do you want to be known for your art? For your motivational speeches? For your acting?
- Is your ideal self in a relationship? Do you have kids? Are you wealthy enough to afford a cook-in chef?
- Write down, as detailed as you can, everything that you imagined.
Once you have an idea of what you want out of life, then you can start to discern your goals. Some common goals people normally write down include:
- Financial goals
- Relationship goals
- Personal Growth Goals
- Career Goals
- Spiritual Goals
If possible, create goals, based on your vision, for each of these categories. Determine how you want to think about money, where you want to be in your career and what you want your relationships with friends and family to look like.
From there, it’s time to start thinking about how you can make that dream-life a reality.
Creating Life Goals
There are two types of goals you can create: long-term goals and short-term goals. Long-term goals might be achieved over the course of years or decades, while short-term goals can be achieved in days or months.
Long-term Goals
Your long-term goals should be easy after visualizing your ideal life. Think about which parts of that life are most important to you.
Maybe you were in a stable, emotionally healthy relationship in your vision. That could be a long-term goal. Maybe you were on T.V. interviewing with Jimmy Fallon about your new movie. You might put down “star in your first blockbuster” as one of your long-term goals.
Short-term Goals
Once you’ve determined your long-term goals, break them down into short-term goals. This is what you should be doing in the next couple of days or next couple of months.
If you’re trying to become a world-renowned actor, for example, then a short-term goal might be to star in your first college play. If you don’t have any acting experience, another short-term goal could be to enroll in an acting class at your local community college.
Ideally, your short-term goals will all be significant stepping stones toward achieving your long-term goals. Then your long-term goals will accumulate together to transform your current life into your ideal reality.
Daily Habits
Now for the most important part: your daily habits. Long-term success in life is based on the microscopic decisions we make every day.
Your daily habits should both be optimized so that they’re working toward your short-term goals and your long-term goals. While these daily habits aren’t going to show you results overnight, over the course of years they will become the foundations for your long-term achievements.
That said, while you should have daily habits focused on your long-term goals, they should also facilitate you living a healthy life.
So yes, while you might want to have an hour of violin practice every day to work toward becoming a great musician, you should also prioritize eating healthy and taking care of your body.
There are universal daily habits that will help you function and achieve. For example, you might set yourself a daily sleep schedule so you always have at least eight hours of sleep allotted for each day. You might make it a daily habit to exercise first-thing in the morning to boost your endorphins and brain-power for the rest of the day.
If you choose the right habits and stay disciplined, you’ll be on your way to an ideal life in no time.
Being Flexible
Once you determine what tasks are most important to you, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to be perfect at implementing your habits and achieving your goals. Progress isn’t instantaneous. It requires hard work and the ability to get up after failure.
Just remember that if you don’t execute perfectly on your daily habits, that you will have another chance tomorrow. Don’t take it as a loss. Realize that even when you stumble, as long as you get back up afterwards, it wasn’t a wasted attempt.
With that said, it’s time to start your journey toward becoming the best version of yourself. Good luck!