8 Simple Reminders to Help You Create The Life You Want

Every college grad has big plans for their life, but most of us don’t accomplish them. Geoff Blades, author of Do What You Want, will show you how to establish your personal system of success, and take control of your career.

1. What do you want?

On March 10, 2000, the internet bubble burst. Our business started to tank, and over the course of the next nineteen months, half the office got let go.

I stepped back and said, “What do I really want? Is this the career and life that I truly want?” I drew out a pie chart with my life with this tiny sliver labeled “not work,” and I asked myself:

“Is this is the life I dreamed of as a kid?”

The truth is that I’d never picked up a self-help book to get to Goldman Sachs. It was formulaic, “put your head down and work hard.” That attitude, that approach had taken me from working class nowhere Australia to the only job that Goldman Sachs offered in Australia.

I thought success was actually quite straightforward. The hard part came when I’d run that track out.

What do you want now, and how can you get it?

2. What can you do today?

No matter what I wanted, it was only going to come to me one way, and that wasn’t by sitting around gazing into space, imagining an amazing life.

It was going to come through action.

I focused on the theoretical, but I also made it practical.

What specifically can you do today to keep advancing in the right direction?

3. How can you become content?

A lot of my work today is about rewiring the social conditioning that keeps us in a place of discontent.

Ultimately, rather than seeing life like an endpoint, somewhere that you want to get to, find that thing that you want to do every day. The thing that you love and enjoy doing.

Just do it.

We actually don’t need to know what we want.

I’m not even sure that many of us will ever know. In fact, the question of “what do I want” traps a lot of us. In some ways it’s an excuse.

Your life is the process of discovering that question.

As it opens up new ways of thinking, do you keep living and evolving that question or do you choose to stay stuck for the rest of your life?

How do you find contentment every day?

4. What keeps you where you don’t want to be?

If you had to put this answer into two big buckets, you would say one big bucket is uncertainty. The brain is not set up to deal with uncertainty. We’re certainty-making machines.

A conscious mind needs to be certain.

The second big bucket is fear. Ultimately, there are only two energies, two ways of being: You can either live in fear or you can live in love.

We all want to unleash ourselves in life, but very few people are willing to go on that journey.

The Hero’s Journey is scary and dangerous by definition.

All my bosses said, “Why are you leaving?” The only answer I had was that I don’t know what I want, but I know this isn’t it.

That period fundamentally shifted the way that I thought about the world, but it didn’t solve the problem for me. It didn’t lead me to an answer. It just enabled me to keep progressing the search.

What’s keeping you stuck?

5. Let your life be difficult.

Writing my first book broke my mind.

I was ready to push go, then I started to print stuff out and read it. It was unreadable. I started to get what I call the chest feeling. Some might label it anxiety. It was just sheer terror.

I thought, “I’ve been at it for months. I can’t do any better than this.”

But I had already decided I was leaving. I had already decided this was my path. This was the mission I was going to do in the world.

I had to go to rock bottom. I had to break my mind.

It was the anvil from which I forged myself. It needed to be that hard. It needed to force me to become the kind of person who could actually do this job.

I went from having no idea what I was doing to having four books out. This is a manifestation of creating the life you truly want.

6. Let your life be simple.

Get to the heart of what you want, and then build a custom system around it.

We all know that we have to have a goal. The problem with that is that if you have to wait till you figure out what you want before you can actually take action, you get stuck.

There are two very simple processes to set a goal.

The first process is to visualize it. Just imagine what you want. It doesn’t need to be when. It doesn’t need to be specific. It’s just this general, overarching feeling of, “This is the life I imagine myself living.”

Then, the second process is to focus on the present, no matter what life you want to be living in 5, 10, 20 years.

The only goal that matters is the one specific goal that’s right in front of you.

If I’m dreaming of doing what I want every day, all I need to be focused on is the next step from where I am that enables me to keep expanding my options.

7. Stay present.

The brain grasps the outcome, then it becomes this big thing. For me, that was thousands of pages of mess that I developed over 10 years that I needed to then turn into a book.

Every day, I woke up saying, “Got to write this book. Got to write this book. Got to write this book.” Versus, “Hey, I’m just going to write for five hours today.”

Because if you write for five hours today, you’re going to get that book written.

If you sit back and dream and think about the outcome, you’re unlikely to take any action.

That only drives the overwhelm and anxiety and fear and gasping and all that other stuff into the brain.

Chunk your goals down into a month, a week, an hour. There were times that I literally lived to minute-to-minute.

8. Be smart.

Step back and say, “This is my goal. What does it truly take to win at this?” Only a small number of things truly drive the success you want.

Get thoughtful about what it truly takes to win.

Find examples of people who are already good at stuff, and then get very systematic about what they do that leads them to success.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

If I could do it while not able to write — my writing was awful — you can, too. If that book is in you and if it matters to you enough, keep going.

Commit yourself to it, create a process, and find the time. Because if you are serious about it, if you have that will, there’s always a way.

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Geoff Blades is an author, coach, and consultant who set out to create a life that he could be proud of. Find his latest book, Do What You Want, on Amazon, and connect with him on GeoffBlades.com