Though You'll Break Your Resolution, Make It

It's Not Too Early to Plan Your Legacy

Even if you're young, drafting your legacy can help you live the life you aspire to. My Psychology Today article today makes the case and lists 14 possible legacy aspirations. 

Reviewing the Photos of Your Life: Clues to what you should be doing now

Your old photos can be useful prompts for thinking about your life. I offer suggestions in my PsychologyToday.com article today.

Identifying Your Secret Desires. . . and using them to make plans for 2020

We may have desires that we won’t even let ourselves think about, let alone try to achieve. Does one of your unspoken desires appear on the list I offer in my PsychologyToday.com article today?

What Resolution to Make and How to Keep the Darn Thing

There's an endless debate on whether it's worth making New Year's resolutions. But how do you decide which to make and, more important, how the hell will you, this time, actually keep it for more than a day? I address those questions in my PsychologyToday.com article today.

Inventorying Your 2017 to Help Ensure a Good 2017

Some people and organizations spend large amounts of time analyzing and planning. 

That’s often ill-advised---too many things can change.  But a brief annual personal self-inventory is probably worth the time. 

In my PsychologyToday.com article today, I ask you questions about your 2016 and the implications for what you want to do in 2017.

Should You Be More of Less Planful?

In an attempt to avoid the pontification and aridity of the how-to article, in my PsychologyToday.com articles, I've recently been embedding psychological and other how-to-do-life issues in short-short stories.

Today's offering addresses the issue of how planful to be.

19 Important Questions to Ask Yourself

Most of us don’t take much time to reflect. My PsychologyToday.com article today offers 19 central questions about you and your life. HERE is the link.

Having a Long-Term Vision

I invite you to take an hour to write a long-term vision: what you'd like your life to look like decades from now.

I did that yesterday. In deciding whether you want to do that, it might be helpful if I shared what I learned from doing it:

• I'm getting a little tired of trying to make a difference. I think back especially on the work I've done with the "at-risk," and the money I've donated to charity, and while perhaps I made a difference, it feels too insignificant or impalpable for altruism to motivate me as much in the future. Similarly, I've made efforts to further unpopular causes I believe in: men's and boy's issues, that higher education is overrated, and a truly honest conversation about race. All I've derived has been opprobrium.
  

The insignificance of my altruistic efforts is amplified when I remind myself that in 2011, I will be but one of seven billion people on the planet, our lifetime is but a blink in time's procession from the Big Bang to the infinite future, and Earth is but one planet in a universe of infinite size and thus likely containing other civilized planets.

When I've written such thoughts in the past, readers responded by encouraging me to believe in God but I cannot believe in a God who would not stop billions of people, including infants, from dying of excruciating diseases.

So in the future, in deciding whether to take on an altruistic task, I may give greater weight to how pleasant the task will be. For example, I enjoy writing, and coaching smart, kind, willing learners on things practical: for example, career, interpersonal communication, public speaking, investments, parenting, romantic relationships, acting, and getting a good deal on purchases.

• I'm tired of trying to fit in. I am a misfit: too intense, too goal-oriented rather than relationship-oriented, and I too often anger people. Except for brief, kind conversations--especially those in which I can solve someone's problem--I'm probably best off doing solo activities: writing, talking on the radio, and taking walks with my dog Einstein. (His name is false advertising: He's dumb as dirt but as sweet as they come.) UPDATE: A day after writing this, I'm finding myself wanting to reach out to people. Hmm. The results of doing the long-term vision exercise may not be so obvious nor so immediate.
  

• If I get too old to live in my own home even with an in-home caretaker (hopefully that won't be for another two or even three decades,) I won't insist on living there until I die. I'll gratefully move to a modest but humane assisted-living facility and, if necessary, a nursing home.

Despite this narrative's soberness, if you'd like to know the procedure I used in writing my long-term vision, here it is:

1. I wrote a description of my present life: career, relationships, money, health, and spirituality (secular humanism.)

2. In each of those areas, I asked myself what I'd like to be different 20 years from now. I wrote quite-feasible-to-achieve goals but you may wish to aim for loftier ones. Many people are more motivated by ambitious goals and enjoy the process of trying to achieve those goals, even if they never get accomplished.

3. I asked myself, "What do I want to do differently today in light of my long-term vision? The answers are the first two bulleted items above.

Note: I wrote my statement of present life and vision for the future quite quickly, then went back to edit it. Then I put it aside for a couple of hours and re-edited.

If you write your long-term vision, feel free, on this blog, to post a comment describing what you learned from the exercise.