Your Passion, Your Personal Mission, Your Life's Purpose

"There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure." - Colin Powell

Success is about more than wealth and possesions, academic titles, and degrees. Planning for success and happiness is about mapping out all the aspects of your life. You need to define the origin, destination, vehicle, backpack, landmarks, and route that you plan to take.

Origin: Who are you?

A map has a starting point. Your origin is who and where you are right now. To gain insights about yourself, you need to look closely at your beliefs, values, and principles... aside from your economic, professional, cultural, and civil status. Moreover, you can also reflect on your experiences to give you insights on your good and not-so-good traits, skills, knowledge, strengths, and weaknesses. Upon introspection, you may realize that you are highly motivated, generous, service-oriented, but impatient. Furthermore, you believe that life must serve a purpose...

Destination: A vision/echo/feeling/taste of who you want to be

"To be successful, you must decide exactly what you want to accomplish, then resolve to pay the price to get it." - Bunker Hunt

Who do you want to be? - this is your vision. It is important that you know yourself so that you would have a clearer idea of who you want to be; and the things you want to change whether they are attitudes, habits, or points of view. If you hardly know yourself, then your vision and targets for the future would also be unclear. Your destination should cover all the aspects of your being: the physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual.

Vehicle: Your Mission

"Whatever you vividly imagine, ardently desire, sincerely believe, and enthusiastically act upon must inevitably come to pass!" - Paul J. Meyer

A vehicle is the means by which you can reach your destination. It can be analogized to your mission or vocation in life. To a great extent, your mission would depend on what you know about yourself.

Travel Bag: Your knowledge, skills, and attitude

Food, drinks, medicines, and other travelling necessities are contained in a bag. Applying this concept to your life map, you also bring with you certain knowledge, skills, and attitudes. These determine your competence and help you in attaining your vision. Given such, there is a need for you to assess what knowledge, skills, and attitudes you have at present and what you need to gain along the way. This two-fold assessment will give you insights on your landmarks or measures of success.

Landmarks and Route: S.M.A.R.T. objectives

"Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you will land among the stars." - Les Brown

Landmarks confirm if you are on the right track while the route determines the travel time. Thus, in planning out your life, you also need to have landmarks and a route. These landmarks are your measures of success. These measures must be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time bound. Thus you cannot set two major landmarks such as earning a master's degree and a doctorate degree within a period of three years, since the minimum number of years to complete a master's degree is two years.

Anticipate Turns, Detours, and Potholes

"Obstacles are those frightful things you can see when you take your eyes off your goal." - Henry Ford

The purpose of your life map is to minimize hasty and spur-of-the-moment decisions that can make you lose your way. But oftentimes our plans are modified along the way due to some inconveniences, delays, and other situations beyond our control. Like in any path, there are turns, detours, and potholes thus; we must anticipate them and adjust accordingly.

If you are not quite sure where you want to go, write a personal mission statement. Once you have, the rest of your life will sort itself out.

And use self-hypnosis to calm your mind and reduce your stress levels. This way you will be able to hear your own inner voice.

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