A vision of success is more than visualizing financial wealth, titles, and material possessions. Planning for success is about mapping out all the aspects of your life. As with a map, you need to define certain details: origin, destination, vehicle, landmarks, and path.

Origin:  Who you are

A map has a starting point. Your origin is who you are right now. Most people when asked to introduce themselves would say something like… “Hi, I’m Joan and I am a teacher”.  This does not tell you anything about who Joan IS; it only tells you her current occupation.

To gain insights about yourself, it’s important to look closely at your beliefs, values, and principles are apart from your economic, professional, and cultural. Additionally, you can reflect on your experiences to give you insights on your good and not-so-good traits, skills, knowledge, strengths, and weaknesses.

Upon introspection, Joan realized that she was highly motivated, generous, service-oriented, but impatient. Her inclination was in the biological-medical field. In addition, she believed that life must serve a purpose, and that wars were destructive to human dignity.

Destination: A vision of who you want to be

Who do want to be?  This is your vision. Now it is important that you know yourself so that you cana have a clearer idea of who you want to be; and the things you want to change whether they are attitudes, habits, or points of view. If you barely know yourself, then your vision and targets for the future would also be unclear. Your destination should cover all the aspects of your being: the physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. Continuing Joan’s story, after she defined her beliefs, values, and principles in life, she decided that she wanted to have a life dedicated in serving others to be the best they can be in life.

Vehicle: Your Mission

A vehicle is the means by which you can reach your destination. It can be related to your mission or life path. To a great extent, your mission would depend on what you know about yourself. Based on Joan’s self-assessment, she decided that she was best suited to become a doctor, and that she wanted to become one. Her chosen vocation was a medical doctor. Describing her vision-mission fully: it was to live a life dedicated to serving mankind as a doctor in conflict-areas.

Travel Bag: Your knowledge, skills, and attitude

Food, drinks, medicines, and other travelling necessities are contained in a bag. Applying this concept to your life map, you also bring with you certain knowledge, skills, and attitudes. These determine your competence and help you in attaining your vision. Given such, there is a need for you to assess what knowledge, skills, and attitudes you have at present and what you need to gain along the way. This two-fold assessment will give you insights on your landmarks or measures of success. Joan realized that she needed to gain professional knowledge and skills on medicine so that she could become a doctor. She knew that she was a bit impatient with people so she realized that this was something she wanted to change.

Landmarks and Route: S.M.A.R.T. objectives

Landmarks confirm that you are on the right track while the route determines the travel time. Therefore, in planning out your life, you also need to have landmarks and a route. These landmarks are your measures of success.

These measures must be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time bound. You can’t set two major landmarks such as earning a master s degree and a doctorate degree within a period of three years, since the minimum number of years to complete a master’s degree is two years. Going back to Joan as an example, she identified the following landmarks in her life map: completing a bachelor’s degree in biology by the age of 21; completing medicine by the age of 27; earning her specialization in infectious diseases by the age of 30; getting placed in local public hospitals of their town by the age of 32; and serving as doctor in war-torn areas by the age of 35.

Anticipate Turns, Detours, and Potholes

The purpose of your life map is to minimize hasty and spur-of-the-moment decisions that can make you lose your way. But oftentimes our plans are modified along the way due to some inconveniences, delays, and other situations beyond our control. Like in any path, there are turns, detours, and potholes… It’s important for us to anticipate them and adjust our map / plan accordingly.

One you have your vision of success in place – hold firm to it through out all of your experience… you’ll be surprised at the degree of success you can create!