There is Risk but Life Comes With A Map

April 28, 2021 - Reading time: 3 minutes

What are your personal goals? Business? Adventure? How Will you achieve it?

Starting a business without having calculated the risks, would be quite irrational and daring like trying to organize a hike on a mountain without having first consulted a map that tells us the safest trails.

When we go out on the road it is usually normal to know where we are going and consult a map to know how to get there. Life is an adventure, a journey that has a beginning and an end, like any travel we take in-between those two points. It can be a recklessness venture to live without knowing where one wants to go, so that we undertake the journey, not knowing where we will go. Life is something more serious than a road trip or a business or a mountain tour. But how many people have been thought to live the they want, how are they going to get it if they don't know the way there?

Our lives are left on many occasions at the mercy of events, appetites, interests. This is a bad way to be happy. To be happy it is essential to have a personal life project, to know where you want to go and where to go once you get their. We have to do it flexibly but be aware that small deviations in time can keep us away from the goal. I think it's worth taking the time to make a personal life project.

But how do you do it?

Where do we start?

There are three commonly agreed upon avenues for which we commonly focus: love, work and culture. Happiness is very close to the order in priorities, if it does not exist it ends up falling into place once the goals are being meet. Love deals with our relationships with ourselves and with others. We have to love ourselves before we can love anyone else. When we speak of "with others" there is also an order that plays a role, the first place must be occupied by the closest relationships: the family. The priorities for which we place on the satisfaction we achieve from work, that is work done professionally and in the best possible way, with effort.

Culture also occupies an important place, one of which we have worked toward building since the antique -- and I do not mean culture as consumption -- rather as a forming and enriching ourselves at a personal level. I won't be able to fulfill the culture aspect of my life the reading of the latest best seller, or by seeing the next big blockbuster released this summer. Culture does not have a time limit and does not depend on our success at work, it has much more to do with personal enrichment, learning and striving to have virtues such as perseverance, the use of time, justice, and social competences such as bargaining power, conflict management, among others.

Do you need a map? Make a plan. See where it fits and your life project should fit into one of these three areas and in this order: love, work and culture. When the order is disrupted we run the risk of negatively disrupting the happiness which we are attempting to achieve. Perhaps the best example is the unhappiness that many of us feel when we place work first and allow it to to take the biggest place in our lives.