How much do you enjoy the tasks you face each day? If you find a significant difference in how you feel about the things you want to do and things you have to do, ask yourself the following:
- Are you honest about what you want and why you want it? Have you set your goals based on the qualities you have listed in your life plan?
- Are you doing the most important things? Do you organize each day, and each period of each day, according to the priorities you have set in the values section of your life plan?
- Are you doing the right things? Do the goals you have set circumscribe the things you have to do each day? If not, how can you change your goals to include everything you need to do? How can you change your tasks to remove what does not contribute to your goals?
As long as your daily actions are misaligned with the rest of your life plan, you won’t experience the full benefits of your transcendent purpose in your daily life. The daily barriers to excellence will always outweigh the daily motivators for overcoming them when the daily tasks are taken independent of your purpose.
When you realize you are lacking motivation in any moment on any day, you can and should be able to ask: “Why am I doing this?” If you have earnestly followed the life plan framework, your sincere answer will always be: “Because this will lead me to the greatest joy.”
Because a life plan provides a mapping between daily tasks and your transcendent purpose, you will find yourself with overwhelmingly sufficient reasons to not only accomplish much more each day, but with joy and satisfaction in what would previously be a chore. You will do more and better than you thought you could and sacrifice what you thought you wanted because of what you want even more. You will also discover that you have previously unrecognized opportunities daily to engage with particularly difficult tasks that were simply beyond your ability to cope with under the prior paradigm.
The hierarchical nature of the life plan orders and incentivizes the unglamorous activities that are completely necessary to achieve what you say you want the most. Without it, you have no idea just how many of the things you feel are important and enjoyable detract from—and even prevent—what you really want the most. With it, you will routinely set aside what your former self would have avidly pursued in order to do what your former self would have found too boring, tedious, or unimportant because you will recognize what the former prevents and the latter enables.
When you realize the connection between your daily toil— whatever it may be—and your purpose, you will find power and motivation in what would otherwise be perceived as distractions from what you really want. You have to see the things you need to do as essential to what you want to do. The life plan will help you connect these, and with the connection comes a flow of power and purpose.