Vision, mindset and consistency for a fulfilled life
I love meeting new people and talking about their values and their life goals. To be honest, this trait of mine is so strong that I can sometimes come by as too curious up-front for some people who find comfort and reassurance in the socially accepted small talk.
While this curiosity makes me sound too invasive to some, it enabled me to shed light on a persistent pattern, a trait shared by far too many.
Most people have absolutely no fucking clue of where they are going in life, what their purpose is, nor how to get there.
Before you tell yourself “who does this motherfucker think he is?”, just take a deep breath and give me a chance to explain myself.
Answering the hard questions
What do I want to do with my life? Why am I studying this subject? Why did I chose this job, and is it bringing me closer to where I want to go? In fact, where do I really want to go?
Chances are, you have absolutely no fucking answer to these questions. To be honest, I have been there a long time, and I can say I am still struggling with this matter.
But what if we could change things? What if you could wake up every morning with a clear view of your purpose and vision for a fulfilled, meaningful future?
What if your “dreams” stopped being just unattainable illusions, but rather clear ambitions and objectives that you could start pursuing today?
I am tired of people telling me they have dreams. I don’t have no fucking dreams. I have goals, with plans of how to get there. And you can develop these too. In fact, anybody can.
Wouldn’t you feel more excited about your ambitious future if you knew the necessary steps and course of actions that will take you there?
In this article, I will share with you what I believe are the important foundations and actionable insights we can start applying to improve our situation, and to become the best versions of ourselves.
I will be talking about the importance of developing the right life-purpose, and the way we can consistently work towards it to achieve a more fulfilled life. A life that we’ll be able to look back at a few years from now, and feel overwhelmed with a rewarding sense of pride and accomplishment.
Sounds like an ambition quest, doesn’t it? Well, let’s dive into it.
Setting yourself the right vision, and living accordingly
Let’s pause and think about your life for a minute. Are you really clear about where you want to take it over the next 5 to 10 years? Do you wake up in the morning aligned with your goals? Are you making decisions aligned with your core values and where you see yourself as an individual?
Most people are simply following the flow of their life. Without the pull of a clear purpose, they are the victims of their destiny, moving forward through the lines and pages of a book they are not writing themselves. They are pulled through their life by things like work obligations, school obligations, and family obligations. Their destiny is an infinite flow of numerous choices imposed to them by their parents, their employers, or simply the consequences of hard decisions they weren’t capable of doing.
Their days and years move forward only because, like water flowing down a water wheel, their commitments push them endlessly forward. They are waking up first thing in the morning, checking their iPhone, taking a shower, and starting the day without a real direction of where they want to go.
Does that ring a bell to you?
Chances are, you have been there, and maybe you still are. Don’t worry, it is completely normal to not have complete clarity until a certain point of you life. However, as I am approaching my late 20s, I realise that we can’t afford to do this anymore.
“If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable” — Seneca
Failing to shape your destiny and writing your own story is the best way to end up with a life you despise. How many “adults” do you see struggling with their jobs and situation, complaining everyday about what life has served them?
You deserve better, we deserve better. And the only way to do this is to get more serious about where we want to go, what we want to achieve, and start working on it today.
Drafting a vivid vision of our ideal life
What if you could visualise yourself, your ideal self, 5 to 10 years from now? Where would you like be?
Based on our values and personalities, we all have the power to frame a picture of this ideal place, this ideal purpose. Wether it implies the impact we want to have in our career, our relationships, our families or in our societies, we can start by drafting this vision today.
Finding your purpose: a collection of various professional, personal, financial, relational achievements, all gathered around your personal set of values and principles.
Dont’t mistake me, I am not talking about defining a single “goal” based on a static position and defined by material belongings. It’s not about telling yourself that you want a big house, an Aston Martin, a smart partner, cute kids and a dog. These are static goals that you would imagine as “finish lines” and that would put you under pressure. Once fulfilled, they would disappear and leave you on a new quest for the next shiny thing. These are unhealthy goals that will only lead you to experience what Harvard researcher Tal Ben-Shahar calls the arrival fallacy, that is, “the false belief that reaching a valued destination can sustain happiness.”
Rather, I am talking about finding your purpose: a collection of various professional, personal, financial, relational achievements, all gathered around your personal set of values and principles.
To make things clearer, I’ll share with you my vision and purpose: Over the next years, my purpose is to continue building healthier societies by making sport free for everyone with AirFit, bringing well-being and fulfilment through sport to people by offering them free access to outdoor fitness areas. This is the impact I want to have on society through my entrepreneurial venture. Along the way, I aim at reaching the financial freedom that would enable me to live life on my own terms, to be able to stop working and start pursuing another venture whenever I want, or to take a break and travel the world to continue discovering new cultures and people. Personally speaking, I strive for maintaining and developing new meaningful relationships that will lift me up, and enable me to continue learning and becoming a better version of myself.
Does that make any sense?
This concept of the “vivid vision” describes how your life will look like a few years from now. Once defined, this vision becomes your internal compass, guiding each and every of your daily decisions. This vision brings the future into the present, so that we can do something about it now.
This purpose doesn’t have to be rigid, as it will, and should be refined while you embark on its realisation. We will surely make new learnings and meet new people that will help us shift our perspective about where we want to go, and we might slightly change the course of our actions. However, our core values will hardly change, as they have been shaped all along our childhood. Since these values are the foundations to our vision, this latter won’t drastically shift.
Once you’ve defined your vivid vision, every daily actions should bring you closer to it. You now have an internal map of where you want to go, and you’ve defined what needs to be done to get there. Along the way, you’ll learn to say no to things that don’t matter, and welcome with open arms and excitement the tasks for a brighter future.
So write down your life vivid vision, describe it a precisely as you can, and start working towards it tomorrow.
“It’s not enough to have lived. We should be determined to live for something”. — Winston Churchill
A growth mindset in a beginner’s mind
Once we’ve defined a clearer outlook on where we want to be a few years from now, it is paramount to adopt the right mindset in order to grow and learn along the journey we are about to embark on.
Following your life purpose will surely come with lots of roadblocks and predicaments, but also major learnings that will shift your perspective on many things you used to be convinced of.
For these learnings and new insights to have the best impact, they need to be approached with the right mindset. You need to adopt what is called a growth mindset, all the while keeping a beginner’s mind.
These are two ideas that I love to keep and cherish throughout my endeavours and my daily life. They rule the way I approach my work, my learnings as well as my personal relationships.
Keeping a Beginner’s mind
A beginner’s mind is about learning to approach each moment with a curious mind that is free of judgment and preconception about how things should be.
As I have first heard about this notion in the stoic writings, I learned more about it while discovering the Zen philosophy. I am usually not what we could call a spiritual person (I tend to be very cartesian and rational), but some insights resonated with me on a deep level.
This might be related to my personal values, as I tend to despise all kind of stubbornness and certainties people have when refusing to question their judgment. Have you ever had a discussion with a person who seemed so convinced by their (stupid) idea that they weren’t listening to a single word of yours, and were merely talking to show you they are right? Didn’t you feel the conversation was going nowhere? Well, this is the kind of situation I can’t stand.
Had these people adopted a beginner’s mind, they would have set their preconceived ideas apart, and we could have a constructive discussion where both of us are exchanging ideas in order to come closer to the truth. Discussions and arguments shouldn’t be a zero sum game where people battle to show who is right, but rather to find out what’s true and benefit from the exchange of ideas.
I couldn’t frame it better than Shunryu Suzuki, a Japanese teacher who played a major role bringing Zen Buddhism to the West, and wrote: “If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything ; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few”.
So remember, all we know, is that we know nothing, and have everything to learn. Stop telling yourself “I am right”, and start thinking “How do I know I am right, and how can I find out the truth”. Try to question every underlying assumptions to your ideas, and you’ll see the benefit you reap along the way.
And this is where the growth mindset is important.
Developing a Growth Mindset
Everyday is a new opportunity to learn, every mistake is an open door to improvement. Having a grow mindset means seing your situation as being in an on-going motion, leading to constant improvement of yourself.
When facing a difficulty or a predicament, this mindset enables you to tell yourself: “well, I haven’t done it before, but there is no reason why I couldn’t learn and do it”.
So instead of being discouraged by a new topic or task that seems too hard because you are not familiar with it, what if you operated a paradigm shift and told yourself: “I will learn by doing it, I might fail a few times, but I will end up completing and mastering it to the point where I’ll develop a new skill”.
You’ll surely struggle in the process of mastering that new knowledge or skill. You’ll probably have to leave your comfort zone, and might even be discouraged by that new venture.
In that case, you’ll need find the willpower to keep pushing forward to make things happen for yourself. You’ll have to get into discomfort in order to strive for growth and fulfilment. How do we do that? Well, it all boils down to one magic world.
Consistency over intensity
Now that you have shaped the right vision and adopted the right mindset, how to make sure you achieve your goals and don’t get lost along the way?
How do you make sure you stay on the right track of actions, and don’t end up burned out or discouraged by the size of your challenges ahead?
When faced with a difficult task and major life-changing challenges, it is easy to be daunted by their size and the huge amount of work implied. It surely is easier to chill in front of Netflix than to find the courage to go out and tackle your most ambitious goals, right?
Don’t lie to yourself, we’ve all been there.
Some of us tend to give up from the beginning, without even starting, thinking we’ll never make it. We are discouraged and intimidated by the size of the task, not knowing where to begin tackling it. We make the disastrous choice of inaction, numbed by the fear of failure.
Have you ever compromised or settled because you felt the solution was too ambitious and outside your grasp? Have you ever assumed that change is impossible because the challenge was too big?
How many ambitious goals have been carried away by discouragement or by the frustrating absence of immediate results?
I’ve met so many people who were paralysed by their big ideas and inspirations. They are surely brilliant, but never started executing, convincing themselves that they’ll start “tomorrow” or “when they have time”.
I am sorry to disappoint you here, but there is no “good time”. Your life’s lights will never be all green at the same time. The best moment to start is now. As the Chinese saying goes, “the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
Some of us start tackling our challenges, but put so much intensity from the beginning that we soon get “burned out” and end up discouraged because the results don’t match our short term expectations.
You surely know someone who has been there. How many ambitious goals have been carried away by discouragement or by the frustrating absence of immediate results?
Instead of being discouraged by major challenges, thinking we will never make it to completion because of lack of ressources, what if we changed the way we look at what a successful completion looks like?
We have wrongly assumed it should all happen all at once, and we give up when things don’t go this way. I am sorry to disappoint you, but nothing will never fucking happen all at once. We are A-to-Z thinkers, worrying about A, obsessing over Z, yet losing sight of the way from B to Y.
The solution boils down to a magic word: the process.
The process is the course of actions and repetitive tasks you need to follow in order to fulfil every small chunk of your major ambitions. Once you’ve defined your vision and what needs to be done to get you there, you must trust the process and the efforts you put on a daily basis.
And most important, you must stay consistent in your course of actions.
Consistency is key, and must trump intensity. This is a marathon, not a sprint.
Both the Stoic and Zen philosophy, which appeared hundreds of years and thousands of kilometers away from one another, point out the paramount importance of trusting the process.
Conveying the Stoic point of view, Ryan Holiday writes in The obstacle is the way : “The process is about doing the right things, right now. Now worrying about what might happen later, or the results, or the whole picture.”
In other words, you need to focus on the process, not the result.
As I’ve said in the beginning, drafting the vision and the big picture is paramount. A lot of times during your journey though, it’s counterproductive and overwhelming to be thinking of everything that lies ahead. Once you start, you need to put your energy on the task at hand, and stay consistent with it.
By focusing exclusively on the present rather than dwelling on the past or worrying about the future, we are able to avoid or remove these intimidating or negative thoughts from our frame of view.
Think big, start small, and focus on the process.
The best analogy I could think of is the one of the athlete. For having personally grown from a former chubby teenager to a sport’s addict hitting the gym 5 times a week in the framework of a few years, I am all the more convinced by this notion of consistency.
In the gym, you don’t give up on training hard and eating healthy because you are not seing your ripped abs after two months. You know this will only happen if you keep doing the same things over and over again for the months and years to come.
The same applies to personal and intellectual development. You train and develop your brain and personality the same way you develop your muscles. Feeding you mind with great ideas and new insights takes time, and you will not see the results overnight. Efforts and learning are like compound interest, they build up over time.
All it takes is to trust the process, the results will follow.
So once you set out to a course of action, stick to it, and don’t let yourself be discouraged because you are not seeing the expected results quickly.
“Love the struggle, not the reward. Love the process, not the result. Love the fight, not the victory”.
So while you keep these ideas in mind, do your best to never compromise nor give up on working towards your vision and purpose. As Jack Ma said, “today is hard, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine.”
Conclusion: Finding happiness in the struggle
It all starts with a clarity of mind, all it takes is discipline in your actions.
You will surely struggle along the way, as we all are. If this was easy, everyone would be leading a meaningful, happy and fulfilled life.
Despite the struggle, what I can promise you is that you will live major life-changing experiences along the way. Experiences that will make you a happier, more fulfilled person throughout the journey.
Fulfilment, meaning and happiness won’t be waiting for you at the end of the journey as final destinations. They will rather be the low hanging fruits you will be harvesting as you move forward in solving your challenges.
As a matter of fact, if you think happiness is the final destination, think again.
As Tal Ben-Shahar says, “attaining lasting happiness requires that we enjoy the journey on our way toward a destination we deem valuable. Happiness is not about making it to the peak of the mountain nor is it about climbing aimlessly around the mountain; happiness is the experience of climbing toward the peak.”
I fact, I believe happiness comes from solving and overcoming challenges one after the other. It arises from the satisfaction of completion and the feeling that you are growing, learning and becoming someone who embodies his personal values. Happiness is thus the byproduct of a meaningful life.
“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful”. — Sigmund Freud
So yeah, I am sorry to tell you that you’ll struggle. We all will along the way. But what if struggle was a necessary ingredient to our fulfilment? I am convinced that the satisfaction of success don’t only come from achieving your goals, but from struggling well.
In fact, the way we face our struggles and act upon it will determine our future success. It all boils down to a magic formula:
Struggle + learning = Growth.
Bad times coupled with good reflexions provide some of the best lessons.
What if we shifted our perspective about the way we experience painful moments? Instead of feeling frustrated or overwhelmed, we need to see pain as nature’s reminded that there is something important for us to learn.
As the Stoics say, Persist and Resist. Persist in your efforts, resist giving in to distraction and discouragement.
Whenever you feel like you are not getting the best results, think progress, not perfection. Remember, done is better than perfect (you might want to check my other article on that matter).
So as this long article is coming to an end, I wish you all to draft the best vivid visions of yourselves, to grow the right mindset, and to consistently work towards your fulfilment, whether it implies building the next billion dollar company or gaining the financial freedom to be able to sip cocktails on the beach.
And in case you embark on your journey and still feel unsure about your future after a few years, here are some wise words to keep in mind: “You look at where you are going and where you are and it never makes sens. But then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge”.
Cheers to you !
