Creating Your Future

Stop listening to the same old repurposed advice on how to create a successful future and instead do it your way.

What I read: “How to Plan a Successful Future” by Guy Reichard. Last updated April 18, 2024.

Everyone wants a successful life. At least I hope that’s true. Of course, what defines success is rightfully in the eye of the beholder. No two people are likely to have the identical definition of what success means for them and that’s a good thing.

Yet so much of the advice given about how to have a successful life seems like regurgitated self-help pablum that’s perhaps somewhat useful at a mile high level but not always all that useful at an individual level.

Much of the advice in Guy Reichard’s article can be useful. By no means do I mean to imply by my introduction that there aren’t bits of gold in their advice. Still, some of it seems to run counter to many people’s real-life experience of how to achieve a successful life.

Let me comment on Reichard’s advice one by one. If after my commentary you agree with 100% of what they wrote, awesome. The considered life is the only life worth living and by reading what they wrote and agreeing with it after some thought you’ve engaged in what ancient to modern philosophers call the considered life. But I hope you’ll consider my caveats too as you ponder your future.

Defining Your Future Goals

I’ve written about my lifelong addiction to constant life goal creation. In “Stop Dangling Carrots” I explain how I’ve moved away from goal creation and arrived at a much more useful approach for me.

Perhaps we should all try living with fewer goals, or at least more loosely held goals, and instead focus on the process, the practice, the day-to-day work that produces great outcomes even when those outcomes might not look exactly like our original goal.

I don’t find goal creation all that useful except to give one a momentary snapshot of a possible future to guide ongoing moment-to-moment thinking and action. A rigid lockstep march toward goals might be unwise.

Focus on process, not goals. Focus on the day-to-day practice or work or whatever you do to move you ahead a bit in whatever direction seems right at the time. Some would call this intuitive living. In “Living Intuitively” and “More On Living Intuitively” I explain more about that.

I don’t disagree with all of Reichard’s advice. Sure, find a quiet place and ponder your future. Perhaps envision what that future might look and feel like. Ask yourself if you need any education or resources to make it happen. And yes, focus on the present. But I think the advice to focus heavily on the future is misguided. The future should at best be a generalized direction and rarely something incredibly specific. “Be here now,” as the iconic Ram Dass book suggests. Live the vast majority of your life in the present only giving a smidgen of time to reflecting on your past or perhaps just a smidgen more to envisioning your future.

Following Your Passion

I’m not sure this is always great advice. In “On Pursuing Passion” I suggest it might not be.

Personally, I’ve always had a difficult time defining what passion is for me. I see, hear, or think about something and ask myself if that stirs passion in me. The answer I receive is usually nebulous at best.

Obviously having some passion for something helps us do it. Identifying what brings us joy and meaning is great. But passions and sources of joy and meaning run the gamut. I’m passionate about having great sex and I enjoy it immensely, but it’s not necessarily going to move me any closer to an arbitrarily created goalpost.

Passion is great, but vehement passion isn’t always necessary. I loved my last corporate job of 24 years. I worked with great people. I was treated well. The company understood the true meaning of work/life balance (an overused phrase I tend to dislike these days). It was a great job.

Was I passionate about it? Not really. I was good at it. It paid well, I certainly didn’t hate it. It gave me the income to do many of the other things about which I was indeed passionate. Sometimes we don’t need robust passion for something to pursue it for practical reasons.

As for pursuing what you’re good at, I tend to agree. There’s a mental model of happiness I often invoke because I like its simplicity. Self-determination theory is a model devised by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan and has been elaborated upon and refined by many scholars and researchers from around the world. Self-determination theory proposes that every human being needs three things – autonomy, competence and relatedness – to achieve optimal happiness.

Doing what you’re good at equates to competency. So, I’m a big fan of that mindset.

When Reichard suggests to trust your instincts, that seems tantamount to living intuitively and I refer back to my previously mentioned reference to that way of approaching life.

Maintaining Motivation

I’m a fan of creating a simple, personal practice that moves your life thoughtfully ahead in some way. In “The Day-to-Day Slog of Success” I suggest having a daily practice. In “There’s No Perfect Process” I point out there’s no such thing as a perfect process. In “How I Currently Navigate My Life” I discuss how I navigate through life including links to many of my other related writings. Much of it relates to Reichard’s topic of planning for a successful life.

As for journaling which Reichard mentions, many friends have stuck to journaling. I know many find it valuable. It’s just not a habit I was ever able to develop. If it works for you, awesome. It evidently works for many others.

When Reichard mentions diverging from your path as needed, I agree wholeheartedly. In “Our Crooked Path” I write that life does not and never will move along a straight line, toward a goal or toward any specific destination. That’s just not how life works.

Success and failure is a spectrum, not a binary. And you can shift to an entirely different spectrum if you so choose.

I maintain a constantly updated digital notes file and that’s about as close as I get to keeping any semblance of a goal in view. Years ago, I tried posting my goals so I saw them every day and never noticed any better forward movement than if I had not. Your mileage may vary.

Yes to celebrating achievements. That’s good advice. Celebrate frequently. Achievements can be small or big. I once met a friend for celebratory drinks because I had finally gone back to the gym after a long absence.

Setting Things in Motion

Yes yes yes to opening a savings (and investment) account and start adding to it regularly. The 20% Reichard mentions is great if you can. I started at 10% decades ago and raised it to 15% later in life. Do what works but do it.

Read in up dollar cost averaging and I recommend a superb short investment book, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns (paid link), by John Bogle. In it, Bogle points out how regular investment in low-fee index funds is a solid way to invest without having to worry about playing the market (which the average person typically can’t do well).

So, after you’ve stashed maybe 6-12 months-worth of emergency life expenses into your savings account, consider opening an investment account too.

Cut back on expenses as you can. Lately the money leak I’ve most often identified is unused and long-forgotten subscriptions. Unsubscribing and saving those small monthly fees add up.

I don’t own a car by choice. In “On Not Owning a Car” I explain why I don’t own a car and in “How much I save not owning a car” I break down how much I save (which is more now a year and a half later).

In “Simplicity By Another Name” I extol the benefits of living simply. I don’t call what I do minimalism because anyone who sees my home would know I’m not a minimalist. But the simplicity mindset is a good one to cut back on expenses and perhaps live a more comfortable and less stressful life.

Reichard concludes with keeping an open mind and that’s good advice. To Reichard’s credit, he concludes with this.

Think of your plan as a skeleton: you can build onto it, but you won’t know exactly how it’s going to turn out from the start. Follow your dreams—but be open to new possibilities.

I think that’s great advice. Never look to any sort of a plan, be it loosely constructed or written down in detail, as anything more than a skeleton you build upon.

Keep your options open. Be forever curious. Explore possibilities. Create your life in the moment with your future perhaps only a vague direction in which you want to head.

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