PART 3: DRAWING YOUR OWN MAP
The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.
--George Bernard Shaw
What does your future hold? If you said "I don't know," you're probably right. A good portion of what will happen in the future is, by definition, unknown and, quite often, out of our control. In fact, everything about the future is pretty vague--except that which you will be able to affect.
Think about the future, but don't worry about the things over which you have no control. Concentrate your efforts instead on those things which you can do, plan for, or prepare for. Then plot the path to your goal.
If you were the pilot of an airplane, and you wanted to plot a course from California to Japan, you'd note that your world map shows a route traveling due west, across the Pacific Ocean as the shortest distance between San Francisco and Tokyo.
Your common sense, however, tells you that the map isn't exactly the best representation of the round earth; and so you pick up your world globe (a scale "model" of the earth) and find, to your surprise, that the shortest distance to Japan is actually a northward arc from California over the North Pacific, flying over Alaska's Aleutian Islands and back toward the southwest, approaching Japan from the north.
On your map, you simply transfer the coordinates of this "great circle route" (as it is called) to the vertical and horizontal grid as a crescent-shaped line.
Believe it or not, this is the most direct route (just check your globe!). The only problem is that it's very difficult to fly a curved course, constantly changing your compass heading. So, you divide the route line into a few smaller pieces, and straighten each piece (or leg). Now you can fly one heading for awhile, then shift to another, and so on until you finally see Japan under your wingtip.
I use this to illustrate planning in general, hoping to make a point about the nature of what it means to plan your life:
You never really "arrive" at life. You may fly for hours to get to the point where you can turn your plane to begin another leg of your journey. That point itself is an important goal. But its realization should not end your ambition to continue your journey. And what happens when you finally arrive in Japan? Do you simply walk away from the plane and sit under a tree for the rest of your life? Hardly! By the time you land the plane, you've already got an idea where you'd like to go next. And you'll spend just enough time on the ground to plan your next trip.
Those who will be most successful in the future are those who will be prepared for what is ahead. Yes, we cannot predict the events of the future, but we've already decided that it's better to do something now, rather than wait for anything to happen. President Abraham Lincoln said: "Things may come to those who wait,but only the things left by those who hustle."
We needn't fear the future. Rather, we should see it as a challenge--something which is unknown, but something which can bring good, as well as bad. Library shelves are full of the biographies of those who wouldn't let fear stand in their way, even when the result of their efforts were less than they had hoped. An epitaph written to British explorer Robert Falcon Scott appears on a monument to this man who finally arrived at the South Pole, only to be trapped in a storm upon his return from the pole and die of starvation and exposure just a few miles from his base camp. The monument quotes the last line of Tennyson's Ulysses: "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." What a great lesson.
Dreams are possible. Goals can be achieved, often in spite of an unpredictable future. It takes effort, and direction, but it also takes a little patience.
In an address to graduates at Loyola College in Baltimore, author Tom Clancy said:
Nothing is as real as a dream.
The World can change around you,
but your dream will not.
Responsibilities need not erase it.
Duties need not obscure it.
Because the dream is within you,
no one can take it away.
The most important question you'll ask yourself as you look to the future is "Where do I want to be--and what am I willing to sacrifice to get there?"
Sometimes a small investment in thought for the future may be all we need to reach our potential. Planning for the future may be as simple as choosing how to use time to solve our problems--how to invest our ideas and wait for them to grow.
We all dream of a grand future. An old Indian adage said that if a man or woman aimed their arrow at the sky, they would at least hit the top of the mountain; while an arrow aimed merely at the top of the mountain could just as easily strike a rock or tree, falling fall short of its goal.
We live in a world where those that strike the peaks or the clouds are revered--even worshiped; and those of us who may never see such celebrity are relegated to ordinary, even tenuous subsistence.
So we aim for the sky. We shoot for the clouds. We compare ourselves to those we see in movie theaters or on "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" and... we find we feel pretty inadequate. Makers of a recent television commercial for women's clothing used a number of different models to create a composite woman. One model's hair was photographed, then another's face, then another's hands, figure, etc., until the blended images on the screen gave the impression of the perfect woman.
How do we compete with fiction? Should we strive for perfection? How realistic should our plans be? Even more fundamental, can we (or should we) be "the best" at everything?
The huge disparity of academic fields of study is a good example of the amount of things there are to know in life. It's impossible to do it all. Even great universities find themselves specializing their vast faculty talents in selected fields. The amount of information available to us is incomprehensible and grows every day. It's extremely difficult to know everything there is to know in a particular field, let alone become an authority in multiple fields.
It's a little like a city from which dozens of roads radiate in all different directions as the spokes of a wheel. Once you're traveling a particular road, its very difficult to know what's going on at the end of another road, hundreds of miles away. But you can know your own road... and you can know it well.
Like scholarly pursuits, our life experiences are also varied and diverse. We all "travel" different "routes," carrying the experiences gained along the way to help us choose and blaze the trail ahead. With time, too, comes changes in the kinds of challenges we face and the skills we may need to overcome them.
Inject your plans for the future with enough realism to know what is truly possible and what is probable for you. Develop an approach to your life that allows flexibility for unforeseen events. But think big!
With the right attitude, you can use your personal vision of perfection or excellence as a motivating force in your life. It can become the sky and clouds toward which you aim.
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