What is The Trajectory Of Your Life?

…and can you change it

Photo by Chase Yi on Unsplash

Everyone’s life is different. It is easy from the outside to judge and tell others that the path they are on is the wrong path. But because everyone’s path is different, that makes it hard to fairly evaluate.

Maybe we need to focus on judging ourselves first?

Stop for a moment and think about the different parts of your life. Let me list a few:

1. work
2. spouse/partner
3. kids
4. financial
5. physical
6. emotional
7. spiritual
8. friends
9. Hobbies
10. etc…

These were some I can just think of at the top of my mind. If I spent 30 minutes I could probably improve my list and even put them in order of importance.

I suggest you do that because it will show you what makes up your life and what you truly value.

So what?

Well, we are all moving along those dimensions. Every day we move a little. Think of it as either moving up or down but we are moving. It is rare that we standstill in terms of quality in any of those dimensions.

I want you to stop again and consider each part in terms of how it will look in the future. Construct a matrix as one shown below with all of your areas listed on the left-most column.

For each row, simply your guess as to whether the area will improve or not within that time period. You can simply use + for better or — for worse.

What do you notice?

Is an area going to improve or get worse over time? These are areas you have defines as making up your life. You should care that they improve BUT be honest with yourself. Are they getting better or worse?

Now that you have a map of what you believe your life is truly going to look like if you don’t actively improve it. That is it. That will most likely be your future reality.

What if you don’t want it to be?

Well, consider changing it by 1% each day/month/year. What would your life look like if you just changed it by 1% each month in each of the areas? That is, without compounding, 12% per year.

If you improved the quality of every single one of your areas by 12%, would you notice it? I believe that not only will you notice it BUT you will be a different person. A much better person.

Notice that I am not giving you any guidance on how to improve them or what 1% improvement means in each of these areas. That is for you to decide. It is personal and you should take it personally.

I urge you to care enough to do this exercise and change the trajectory upward of your future life. You can choose it to be wonderful or let it happen to you and wonder what the heck happened?

My four cents….