Do you have it? Do you know how you want your life to look in 6 months, a year, five years, ten? Do you know what you’ll need to do today, tomorrow, or in the next week or month to get closer to that? Do you know which skills, and character traits you need to develop or fix, acquire and build to be who you need to be in order to have all you think you want to have?

If you have no plan, drop everything you’re doing and go back to ground zero. It doesn’t have to be a good plan. It can’t to be perfect because there are too many variables in the entirety of one life to ever be completely accurate, but make a plan, even if it is horrible and a sketch. The first draft is the backbone – The deeper you delve in and (honestly) ask yourself to imagine the life you’d like for yourself and people you love, the clearer the picture gets. Clarity will be the hardest thing here, but if you don’t even make a plan it will not just be hard but impossible. If you leave everything vague you’re doing this on purpose – you don’t want to set up, as Jordan Peterson aptly calls them “the conditions for failure”. The thing is we are planless because if there is no plan there is no way to determine how hard you’ve failed. You’ll still fail regularly, just won’t feel the blows (and will therefore be unable to learn from them) until the thing escalates to a disaster.

Make a plan, just an honest projection of who you’d like to be. Once you have the big picture break it down, make it manageable and applicable to the everyday life. Success is not an accident. The less vague you are about the concrete actions the more satisfaction you’ll get by completing each step, Don’t be willfully blind just because it is easier. Almost as a rule, the most worthwhile things are not the easiest ones. If they were everybody would do it. Be bigger that the lowest common denominator and make a plan – not a dictatorship of self, but a support that takes into consideration the need to regenerate as well. The void of not knowing where to aim is dangerous. Once you have a direction you’ll calibrate the details along the way. Make a plan. Now.