It seems we all have two clear goals for life. The first is we want to feel happy. That’s not very specific but what “being happy” generally means is that we feel good about ourselves even as we work to improve our situation. So we might not be happy with our situation, we feel good about ourselves and about what we are doing.

From that I came up with a formula of how to live that’s based on three premises.

Premise #1: You’re at where you are at. You’ve got to start somewhere so start where you are at. That means it doesn’t matter if you just out of high school or facing a prison sentence. It doesn’t matter if you just lost a fortune or are managing several million dollars in assets. Where you’re at is where you have to start. Because it’s where you’re at, it’s neither good nor bad. It’s just a starting point.

Premise #2: You want to accomplish a specific goal, ambition or objective.

Premise #3: Your goal, ambition or objective is attainable even though you don’t know the specific steps needed to get there.

If all of these premises are true, how would you start?

You are on a journey.

You are on a journey. We usually want the journey to be a straight line going very fast. That is seldom the case. There will be diversions and obstructions. Some of these we can plan for and many of them we can’t. For those unforeseen obstructions there is one thing we can plan for… how we are going to react to it.

Conclusion

If you accept the three mentioned premises you have lots of choice. Some of those choices will help you get closer to your goal. Other choices will slow you down.

Planning is always important and valuable. The best planning starts within your heart and mind. Plan on being the kind of person who goes after these goals. What character traits do you want to personify? Plan on how you will deal with surprising victories. Will you brag and gloat or will you keep focused and move on? Plan how you’ll react to devastating defeats. Will you give in to depression and frustration? To be sure, victories and defeats are variables within your journey. The only constant of the journey is you.