WHAT DO YOU WANT IN LIFE?

WHAT DO YOU WANT IN LIFE? By Jack Canfield

What do you want to accomplish in life? What do you want to experience? And what possessions do you want to acquire? In the journey from where you are to where you want to be, you have to decide where you want to be. In other words, what does success look like to you? One of the main reasons why most people don't get what they want is that they haven't decided what they want. They haven't defined their desires in clear and compelling detail. They don't know what they want …
MAKE AN "I WANT" LIST
One of the easiest ways to begin clarifying what you truly want is to make a list of 30 things you want to do, 30 things you want to have, and 30 things you want to be before you die. This is a great way to get the ball rolling.
Another powerful technique to unearth your wants is to ask a friend to help you make an "I Want" list. Have your friend continually ask, "What do you want? What do you want?" for 10 to 15 minutes, and jot down your answers. You'll find the first wants aren't all that profound. In fact, most people usually hear themselves saying, "I want a Mercedes. I want a big house on the ocean." And so on. However, by the end of the 15-minute exercise, the real you begins to speak: "I want people to love me. I want to express myself. I want to make a difference. I want to feel powerful" ... wants that are true expressions of your core values.
IS WORRYING ABOUT MAKING A LIVING STOPPING YOU?
What often stops people from expressing their true desire is that they don't think they can make a living doing what they love to do.
"What I love to do is hang out and talk with people," you might say. Well, Oprah Winfrey makes a living hanging out talking with people. And my friend Diane Brause, who is an international tour guide, makes a living hanging out talking with people in some of the most exciting and exotic locations in the world.
Tiger Woods loves to play golf. Ellen DeGeneres loves to make people laugh. My sister loves to design jewelry and hang out with teenagers. Donald Trump loves to make deals and build buildings. I love to read and share what I have learned with others in books, speeches, and workshops. It's possible to make a living doing what you love.
Make a list of 20 things you love to do, and then think of ways you can make a living doing some of those things. If you love sports, you could play sports, be a sportswriter or photographer, or work in sports management as an agent or in the front office of a professional team. You could be a coach, a manager, or a scout. You could be a broadcaster, a camera operator, or a team publicist. There are myriad ways to make money in any field that you love.
But first you must decide what you would like to do. Don't let yourself be concerned about the size or audacity of your vision. As Michelangelo said, "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."
HIGH ACHIEVERS HAVE BIGGER VISIONS
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 experience 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 called our "20/20 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.
THE VISION EXERCISE
The following exercise is designed to help you clarify your vision and what you want to accomplish. Although you could do this as a strictly mental exercise by just thinking about the answers and then writing them down, I want to encourage you to go deeper than that. If you do, you'll get deeper answers that serve you better.
Start by putting on some relaxing music and sitting quietly in a comfortable environment where you won't be disturbed. Then, close your eyes and ask your subconscious mind to give you images of what your ideal life would look like if you could have it exactly the way you want it, in each of the following categories:
First, focus on the financial area of your dream life. What is your annual income? What does your cash flow look like? How much money do you have in savings and investments? What is your total net worth? Next ... what does your home look like? Where is it located? Does it have a view? What kind of yard and landscaping does it have? Is there a pool or a stable for horses? What color are the walls? What does the furniture look like? Are there paintings hanging in the rooms? What do they look like? Walk through your perfect house, filling in all of the details. At this point, don't worry about how you'll get that house. Don't sabotage yourself by saying, "I can't live in Malibu because I don't make enough money." Once you give your mind's eye the picture, your mind will solve the "not enough money" challenge. Next, visualize what kind of car you are driving and any other important possessions your finances have provided.
Next, visualize your ideal job or career. Where are you working? What are you doing? With whom are you working? What kind of clients or customers do you have? What is your compensation like? Is it your own business?
Then, focus on your free time, your recreation time. What are you doing with your family and friends in the free time you've created for yourself? What hobbies are you pursuing? What kinds of vacations do you take? What do you do for fun?
Next, what is your ideal vision of your body and your physical health? Are you free of all disease? How long do you live to? Are you open, relaxed, in an ecstatic state of bliss all day long? Are you full of vitality? Are you flexible as well as strong? Do you exercise, eat good food, and drink lots of water?
Then move on to your ideal vision of your relationships with your family and friends. What is your relationship with your family like? Who are your friends? What is the quality of your relationships with your friends? What do those friendships feel like? Are they loving, supportive, empowering? What kinds of things do you do together?
What about the personal arena of your life? Do you see yourself going back to school, getting training, attending workshops, seeking therapy for a past hurt, or growing spiritually? Do you meditate or go on spiritual retreats with your church? Do you want to learn to play an instrument or write your autobiography? Do you want to run a marathon or take an art class? Do you want to travel to other countries?
Finally, focus on the community you live in, the community you've chosen. What does it look like when it is operating perfectly? What kinds of community activities take place there? What about your charitable work? What do you do to help others and make a difference? How often do you participate in these activities? Who are you helping?
You can write down your answers as you go, or you can do the whole exercise first and then open your eyes and write them down. In either case, make sure you capture everything in writing as soon as you complete the exercise.
Keep your vision someplace where you can see and refer to it often, such as on your computer or bathroom mirror. Every day, review the vision you have written down. This will keep your conscious and subconscious minds focused on your vision. Once you have your vision for what you want to accomplish in your life, the next step is figuring out how to get there. Fortunately there are as many ways to achieve the personal and financial goals identified in your vision as there are people; the difficulty is selecting the right path for you ... the one that leverages your "core genius."
STAY FOCUSED ON YOUR CORE GENIUS
You have inside you a core genius — some one thing that you love to do and do so well that you hardly feel like charging people for it. It's effortless for you and a whole lot of fun. And if you could make money doing it, you'd make it your lifetime's work.
Successful people are able to do this by focusing on their core genius. They then delegate everything else to the people around them.
Compare that to most other people in the world who go through life doing everything, even those tasks they're bad at or that could be done more cheaply, better, and faster by someone else. They can't find the time to focus on their core genius because they fail to delegate even the most menial of tasks.
Many salespeople, for example, spend more time on account administration than they do on the phone making sales, when they could hire a part-time administrator (or share the cost with another salesperson) to do this time-consuming detail work.
Most female executives spend too much time running their household, when they could easily and inexpensively delegate this task to a cleaning service or part-time mother's helper, freeing themselves to focus on their career or spend more time with their family.
Even most entrepreneurs spend less than 30 percent of their time focusing on their core genius and unique abilities. In fact, by the time they've launched a business, it often seems entrepreneurs are doing everything but the one thing they went into business for in the first place.
Don't let this be your fate. Identify your core genius, then delegate completely to free up more time to focus on what you love to do.
When you delegate the grunt work — the things you hate doing or those tasks that are so painful, you end up putting them off — you get to concentrate on what you love to do. You free up your time so that you can be more productive. And you get to enjoy life more.
So why is delegating routine tasks and unwanted projects so difficult for most people?
Surprisingly, most people are afraid of looking wasteful or being judged as being above everyone else. They are afraid to give up control or reluctant to spend the money to pay for help. Deep down, most people simply don't want to let go.
Others — potentially you — have simply fallen into the habit of doing everything themselves. "It's too time consuming to explain it to someone," you say. "I can do it more quickly and better myself anyway." But can you?
If you're a professional earning $75 per hour and you pay a neighborhood kid $10 an hour to cut the grass, you save the effort of doing it yourself on the weekend and gain one extra hour when you could profit by $65. Of course, though one hour doesn't seem like much, multiply that by at least 20 weekends in the spring and summer and you discover you've gained 20 hours a year at $65 per hour — or an extra $1,300 in potential earnings.
Similarly, if you're a real estate agent, you need to list houses, gather information for the multiple listings, attend open houses, do showings, put keys in lockboxes, write offers, and make appointments. And if you're lucky, you eventually get to close a deal.
But let's say that you're the best closer in the area. Why would you want to waste your time writing listings, doing lead generation, placing lockboxes, and making videos of the property, when you could have a staff of colleagues and assistants doing all that, thus freeing you up to do more closings? Instead of doing just one deal a week, you could be doing three deals because you had delegated what you're less good at.
One of the strategies I use and teach is complete delegation. It simply means that you delegate a task once and completely — rather than delegating it each time it needs to be done. When I hired the gardener for my Santa Barbara estate, I said, "I want my grounds to look as close as possible to the grounds at the Four Seasons Biltmore in Montecito, using the budget I'm providing you." When I go to the Four Seasons, I don't have to check whether the trees need to be trimmed or the automatic sprinklers are working. Someone else is in charge of that. Well, I want the same luxury at my home. "With that as our operating principle," I said, "here's the budget. Take charge of the grounds. If I'm ever not happy, I'll let you know. If I'm not happy a second time, I'll find someone else. Does that feel like a workable agreement?"
My landscaper was, in fact, very excited. He knew he wouldn't be micromanaged, and I knew I wouldn't have to worry about it again — and I don't. See what I mean? Complete delegation.
DON'T LET ANYONE TALK YOU OUT OF YOUR VISION
There are people who will try to talk you out of your vision and rob your focus from your core genius. They will tell you that you are crazy and that it can't be done. There will be those who will laugh at you and try to bring you down to their level. My friend Monty Roberts, the author of The Man Who Listens to Horses, calls these people dream-stealers. Don't listen to them.
When Monty was in high school, his teacher gave the class the assignment, similar to the vision exercise above, to write about what they wanted to do when they grew up. Monty wrote that he wanted to own his own 200-acre ranch and raise Thoroughbred racehorses. His teacher gave him an F and explained that the grade reflected that he deemed his dream unrealistic. No boy who was living in a camper on the back of a pickup truck would ever be able to amass enough money to buy a ranch, purchase breeding stock, and pay the necessary salaries for ranch hands. When he offered Monty the chance of rewriting his paper for a higher grade, Monty told him, "You keep the F; I'm keeping my dream."
Today Monty's 154-acre Flag Is Up Farms in Solvang, California, raises Thoroughbred racehorses and trains hundreds of horse trainers in a more humane way to "join up" with and train horses.
So, let me end as I began. What do you want to accomplish in life? What do you want to experience? And what possessions do you want to acquire? What does success look like to you? Success in life works like GPS navigation. All you have to do is decide where you want to go by clarifying your vision, lock in the destination, and then start moving in the right direction. Focus on your core genius and your inner GPS will keep unfolding your route as you continue to move forward. The exact steps — the how — will keep appearing along the way — sometimes just when you need it and not a moment earlier.
Share Your Vision
When you've finished writing down your vision, share your vision with a good friend whom you can trust to be positive and supportive. You might be afraid that your friend will think your vision is too outlandish, impossible to achieve, too idealistic, unrealistic, or materialistic. Almost all people have these thoughts when they think about sharing their vision. But the truth is, most people, deep down in their hearts, want the very same things you want. Everyone wants financial abundance, a comfortable home, meaningful work he or she enjoys, good health, time to do the things he or she loves, nurturing relationships with his or her family and friends, and an opportunity to make a difference in the world. But too few of us readily admit it.
You'll find that when you share your vision, some people will want to help you make it happen. Others will introduce you to friends and resources that can help you. You'll also find that each time that you share your vision, it becomes clearer and feels more real and attainable. And most importantly, every time you share your vision, you strengthen your own subconscious belief that you can achieve it.
Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow
Strategic Coach Dan Sullivan once stated that all entrepreneurs are really con artists. They get other people to pay them to practice getting better at what they love to do.
Think about it.
Tiger Woods loves to play golf. People pay him big money to play golf. Every time he plays, he learns more about playing better. He gets to practice and hang out with other golfers, all the while getting paid for it.
Or consider baseball power-hitter Sammy Sosa when he played with the Chicago Cubs. It took him about one second to hit a home run — as long as it takes for the ball to meet the bat. He earned $10,625,000 for about 70 seconds of batting time per year, so he got really good at making the bat meet the ball. That's where he made his money. That's where he put all his time — practicing and getting ready for the bat to meet the ball. He had found his core genius and devoted the majority of his waking hours to perfecting his genius.
Of course, most of us are not on par with Tiger Woods or Sammy Sosa, but the fact is that we could learn a lot from their level of focus on pursuing what they love.

Source: http://www.nightingale.com/Newsletters/252.asp?source=INLACx252v10