Updated June 19th, 2020
If you could do whatever you wanted to do, what would you do?
Let your imagination run free.
Take a moment and jot down a few quick notes as you ponder this question.
Then take a look at what you wrote down. This is supposedly what you really want out of life.
Is it? Is what you wrote or thought really what would make you the happiest?
If the answer is anything but a resounding YES!, then perhaps you have not been fully honest with yourself in the past, and perhaps your biggest current plans in life are still, deep down, something that you are settling for, because you believe you cannot have what you really want.
What would your ideal life actually look like?
Drop all constraints in your thinking — right now the question is not what might be realistic but rather what is your ideal scenario without constraints or restrictions.
We face choices every moment and when we make our choices it is always in the context of our options. But usually we don’t actually consider all of our options. So we make some choices that might be okay, not realizing we just threw away a choice that could have been superb. A choice we didn’t even know we had.
Why don’t we consider all of our options? Chances are we only consider the options we think might actually be do-able — which is just a fraction of our real options. Hidden assumptions keep us from even posting all of our options on the bulletin board of our minds. And by restricting our thinking to what we in the moment think is do-able for us, we are leaving out too much!
If we start with exploring what our ideal life looks like, we might begin to discover that what was unrealistic before is realistic now. The real value of knowing the ideal is that it always generates creative thinking because achieving it seems out of reach. Creative thinking is valuable because, even if it doesn’t always get you to the ideal right away, it gets you closer than if you just exclude the ideal from the outset in your thinking.
We are often operating within self-imposed constraints. Settling for a “good enough” scenario, whether for our lives, our company, or for any situation, is not the way to generate creative thinking or create the life we long to live.
We have been told so many things are impossible and advised to not aim so high because we will be heartbroken when we fail.
But what if we learned to fly instead?
So ask yourself again, if you could do whatever you wanted to do, what would you do?
Happy Father’s Day! In honor of Father’s Day, here’s an excerpt from my tribute to my father Ned Harvey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFOp9Xb-T50
Here’s to all our fathers!
Best to all,
Bill
Follow my regular media blog “In Terms of ROI“ at MediaVillage.com under MediaBizBloggers.