Be the Driver of Life
“With an action-based plan, you don’t have to rely on input triggers to initiate your actions; instead, your plan triggers your actions.” — 12 week year
This is one of the main tenants guiding my life within the 12 week year strategy. There are a few reasons why I love this strategy thus far for helping me achieve the goals I wish to complete before the “year” is out. I am an average man, of average intelligence, but here are the ways I try to keep up in this rat race.
- I use an amazing Notion.so template that allows me to visually see all my daily activities add up.
- The road map of knowing my destination first, and then building my steps to get there is clear for me. For me, I want to be a software creator — not a programmer, not just a developer, nor just a devops guy, and not just an architect. My dream is to take my crummy idea from a scribbled on coffee stained napkin and have it available for the entire world by the end of day. This vision of myself in the future, say 20 years in the future, helps me drive my daily habits toward that vision.
- I have achieved more results in my first week of implementing this strategy than when I aced university. I enjoyed university, but I was always chasing the grade instead of taking the time to enjoy the journey. Now, I enjoy my technology books. I get to take my time and make my mind maps as small and large as I need for the topic. My life is a dream.
What is your vision for your life? For me, my life is already a blessed life. When I am 75 years old, I hope to be retired from being an employee, but I will have at least one profitable software product that I have seen to the end, or sold. I will, also, be making money as a content creator focused on self improvement. . I also hope to do so in multiple languages. I love Mandarin, Spanish, and Korean. I also see myself in the house I live, with the friends I have and more, and my kids living their lives within an hour drive away. I will be giving more of my wealth and time to charities dealing with substance abuse. This is my vision.
In 5 years how close can you realize your over all life vision? For me, this is very close in terms of giving my wealth and time to charities, yet I am far from being a skillful content creator, and I am not near retirement. I believe in 5 years I will be very skilled in software and I hope to be pursuing my own profitable products.
In 3 years what can you do to realize this 5 year vision? For me, I need to build my ability to focus. Discipline is difficult. If it was easy, then everyone would be successful, but it is not. I see doing the things I don’t feel like doing everyday as a burden, and it is my ability to push through the angst that will do me a great deal of growth. I will read at least two books every 12 weeks. I will not put off starting my personal project, nor will I make excuses as to why I haven’t chased my dream.
What are the daily habits you can implement to achieve 3 of your most important goals? For me, it all begins with prayer and thinking about how my actions can help my life, the lives around me, and the lives of people I may never get to meet. This is the grounding habit. After prayer, I double down on self-reflection by journaling and I go even further, after journaling, by practicing mindful meditation. I have fuond journaling helps me remember events and lessons I’ve learned throughout my life. I have found meditation gives me the ability to sit, which I will talk about in another post, but “sitting” is quite difficult at first, and teaches a wonderful array of lessons about life. My next daily habit is fitness. I run or walk a little over 2 miles on alternating days. On the days I run, I follow up with yoga. On the days I walk, I follow up with weight training. After my fitness routine, I start reading books focusing on my goals: software, finance, and self improvement. I usually go by how I feel at the time, as to which topic I should like to learn at that moment; it is usually software.
Then I work with my wonderful friends, as a developer.
As the work day nears the end of day, I will give a few minutes toward writing Medium articles. I usually finish by studying a second language. I studied Mandarin in university, but as I live in the USA, I believe it is crucial to learn Spanish. Spanish is a wonderful language, and I will eventually return to studying Mandarin again.
It is within the ways I spend my minutes of my day that will truly help me achieve my goals.
I hope this small quip about how I am using the “12 week year” as a driver for making big changes in my life is helpful for others.
