Do not lose hold of your dreams or aspirations. For if you do, you may still exist but you have ceased to live.” – Henry David Thoreau
How important is your life to you? How important is it for you to really be alive? How much do you want for your life to be significant, to be more than a mere existence?
While thinking of the answers to the questions above, you probably feel a growing desire and thirst for life… but the thoughts that afterwards come to your mind cover the light that has just sprung out of you like smoke:
I wonder what it is that I really want?
Oh, how I wish I felt truly alive, but I don’t know how to do that.
Yeah… I don’t know. I tried so many times, but people, the Government, the system won’t let me.
It sounds good, but life’s hard. I don’t know if it’s worth struggling.
I have tried again and again but it still won’t work!
Living the life you dream of is a decision you make yourself. No one can make this decision for you. Should you choose to think that you have tried everything, that others are at fault for your failure, that in order to be happy you have to work hard but that it is not worth the effort, then it will be hard for you to get to live the life you dream of.
This article will give you an overall image of what you should do so as to get to live the life you dream of. I shall list and briefly describe the factors implied by this process, where after I shall detail each of these factors.
You have to know what you want!
In order for you to live the life you dream of, you need to know what you want: you need to have an image of the future you want and you need to clarify the specific results you want to achieve. Only when you know what you want will you be able to focus your effort to that which is important to you. This vision comprises images of who you will be in the future and of what the future will bring.
You have to have a strategy!
In order to make the transition from what you want to what you have to do, you need a strategy, a plan of action. This is the phase where goals come in. They transform vision into concrete results and inspire different ways of action.
You have to believe that you will obtain it!
In order to initiate and persist in the actions you have set for yourself, you must have faith that you will get to live the life you dream of. You must have faith in a better future, a future in which you’ve got complete control over everything that is to come, and you’ve got the necessary skills to steer change in the direction you want.
You have to persevere and work hard!
The road to success is often an ocean of failures we have to swim in. This is the reason why success is unpredictable and why we have to persevere until we are ready for it to “appear” in our lives. No matter what we take upon ourselves, we have to put intense effort into it for a long period of time.
You have to learn from your mistakes!
It is unlikely that we will know right from the start which strategy will get us from A to B. If we knew it, then they wouldn’t call it a strategy but a procedure. Unfortunately (or luckily), we don’t have personalized procedures to tell us how to fulfill our goals. Hence, there’s no other option but to adjust our strategy according to the new information.
