If God told you exactly what it is you were to do;
You would be happy doing it, no matter what it was.
What you’re doing IS what God WANTS YOU TO DO.
BE HAPPY!!!
In the delightful film, Miss India America, Lily is graduating at the top of her high school class and has it all figured out. She is going to Harvard with her boyfriend, Karim, to become a brain surgeon, just like dad. Karim will be happy as a petroleum engineer, and they will have the proverbial 2.5 children in an upscale suburban estate.
Unfortunately, Karim doesn’t like the idea of being an accessory to Lily’s life plan. When he meets gorgeous Reshna, the reigning Miss India America, he flips for her and dumps Lily.
Now Lily must start all over with her plans. Her only way to win Karim back is to become Miss India America, herself! This sets up the plot of the movie. But this is also an all-too-familiar scenario in upwardly mobile Americans, Asian or otherwise. Life just isn’t that simple!
The Pace of Change Is Ever Accelerating
We are about to enter faster, deeper changes than when the Internet became commercialized early in President Clinton’s first administration, and the buzz around the World Wide Web was to be heard everywhere.
We are now witnessing the convergence of the Cloud, Big Data, Robotics, Autonomous Vehicles and Artificial Intelligence in a society that will increasingly resemble that of Star Trek. Oh, did I forget 3D printing? So much for outsourcing manufacturing!
To top this all off, we are in a period of escalating terrorism, dwindling resources, global warming and disruptive climate change. While the overall economy has held against all odds, its foundation is shaky, based as it is on currency by governmental fiat, with nothing solid to back it up.
To carefully plan your life in great detail today is much like shooting fast-moving ducks in a penny gallery. Everything is a moving target!
Related article: How To Turn Your Life Around
What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?
Most of us were taught to have a career in mind, to have some sort of idea what we were going to do past high school. Usually, this entailed college, finding a mate and having kids. Whichever way you looked, you needed to prepare for a definite role in life. With two-income families the norm, being a housewife was no longer a viable option for most women.
We are now in a period where each one of us will have at the very least three separate careers, and the average job, even for business executives, is three years or less. Sometimes, it is much less, and increasingly, it is working on a contingent basis as a contractor or temp.
How then can we determine the right career and stick to it? Most of us can look at Steven Spielberg with envy that he knew from adolescence that all he wanted was to be a famous movie director. Steven actually finished his first feature, Firefly, in 16 millimeters while still only in high school! Would we all could be so lucky!
A most realistic example would be Steve Jobs, who dropped out of college after his first year, auditing classes, sleeping on the floor and bumming meals at the local Hare Krishna temple. Steve spent time around an Apple orchard at Reed College in Oregon, and suddenly got the bright idea to travel to India to find his guru. Steve Jobs ended up the greatest entrepreneur the world has ever known, transforming six separate industries.
If only we were all such geniuses!
Getting the Four Seasons Right
Life planning is becoming all the more problematical, as we have totally different requirements in the four seasons of our lives.
The first season, SPRINGTIME, is all about learning, about school. Dreams and good grades are high priorities, long with baseball, volleyball and Internet games.
The second season, SUMMER, is all about preparing for or finding a professional job or doing a startup in an increasingly competitive world. Add on to that the emotional and biological drives for husband or wife and kids, and you have your hands full.
The third season, FALL, is increasingly about finding a second career or business and creating a new life as your kids begin to take on lives of their own. You begin to look at worthwhile causes and the meaning of it all while you still have the energy to “make a dent in the universe,” as Steve Jobs was fond of saying.
The fourth season, WINTER, is the beginning of the searching questions: “Who are we, where did we come from, where are we going?” Also, relationships become increasingly compelling. Learning becomes softer, as technical and vocational training become less and less relevant.
Personal Life Plan: Job, Career or Work?
Richard Bolles, in his ground-breaking annual, What Color Is Your Parachute? as well as his classic study on work/life planning, The Three Boxes of Life, opens up the Big Picture. While most people get into planning through pressure to find a job after being made redundant, it is well to recognize the difference between three fundamental terms.
Your JOB is a set of responsibilities assumed in a given role with stated objectives done as a service to an organization, corporate, public or nonprofit. You will likely keep having one job after another throughout your life, unless you succeed at creating your own company. Then it will be a question of having one client or customer after another!
Your CAREER refers to an occupation, or course of action, around a specific industry or domain. Being a brain surgeon is to enter medicine as a highly trained medical doctor operating on patients in a clinical context. You will most likely have several of these in a lifetime. This even goes for highly specialized domains, such as neurology.
Your WORK refers to your vocation, what you are called here on earth to do. It is neither a job nor a career. Your work refers to who you are and the difference you can make in this world. It entails your central passion, your unrecognized talents. It is deeply spiritual in nature, whatever your religious perspective. It directly relates to your relationships, how you impact the lives of everyone around you.
Finding Your Mission, Vision and Message
All of us have a mission, vision and message as part of our work in life. You can look at this as the design of your Creator, or your Higher Self. There is something you were sent here to do no matter what. You have a unique and compelling vision to make the world more like heaven and less like hell. You even have a message, something you are uniquely contoured to share with the world.
Your mission, vision and message are not dependent upon the rapid change happening around the world, although that change can catalyze the full realization of each.
Related article: Begin Seeing Life From A Different Perspective
For me, they didn’t crystallize until my 40’s and 50’s, when it became increasingly apparent that I was destined to work and play with people from many different countries. I worked to end the arms race and environmental destruction, got into advanced technology and media only to realize that what we need most is a new universal consciousness, a deep reference for life and love for everyone.
Your Peak Experience: When It All Starts Coming Together
Werner Erhard, along with Alan Watts, did much to introduce the postmodern world to the idea of perfection as being inherent in what is.
It is not so much something you do. It is more something you are.
Things are the way they are, and it is perfect that they are that way when we say the truth about it all.
As you grow older, and start opening up to your intuition, to your right brain, you see life planning more like design and painting a picture than writing bullets or composing an essay. You and I are here to serve a higher will, that of our Ultimate Self. We didn’t really mess up, as much as it seems. Our God is Absolute Love, and the truth of that finally begins to flood our innermost being.
Yes, plan, and keep on planning, because we are creatures that plan. Just don’t get too attached to your plans.
Yes, create new plans and work on them. Just don’t get too attached to them!
Treat the activity more like play than work. Look at personal life planning as a way way to arrive at satori, a sudden flash of who you are in this incarnation and what you ought to be doing. Everything you ever did, including countless mistakes, was indispensable to bring you to this very moment of infinite possibility. And the possibilities facing you now truly are INFINITE.
How to Get a Clearer Focus Starting Today
Denise Fletcher has taught thousands of students during the last 20 years. She specializes in enabling transitions. Denise is highly practical in the way she goes about it. Denise can get you in touch with your values, priorities and objectives, based on your preferences, past and present, as well as all the achievements that resonated deeply with you.
She offers an affordable and easy way to get a fix on the next phase of your journey. Consider it a dance toward your ultimate destiny. It takes two to tango. Why not consider her as your partner?
Why Most Personal Life Plans Don’t Work appeared first on http://consciousowl.com.
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