Next 10 Years Plan — part 1
What’s Your Vision For The Next Decade?
Let’s improve the lives of more than 314mil people within the next 10 years. Let’s try it!
Do you live by your goals? Do you have your bucket list? If you do, then congratulations! I don’t have one and never have, at least not officially. I do have ToDo lists and, more importantly, I always plan my next decade’s challenge. A little vision for my next 10 years. Nothing too concrete, nothing too vague. I use it to provide a sense of direction and to know how close I come to achieving it. So a little more concrete than Google’s “Don’t be evil” but with the same direction setting influence.
This is my first time making my plan public and the reason is simple: I can hardly achieve this goal myself and I don’t really have a concrete idea on how to do it. Therefore, I would be grateful for any hint, idea, discussion, or tip from each one of you. Maybe you will find the thought process for “next decade planning” inspiring, or we can join forces and try something together….
As hinted above, in the next decade “I want to improve the lives of more than 314,159,265 people on this planet.” Not on some other planet, as Elon Musk from SpaceX might suggest, but here on Earth. If you think it sounds crazy, or you don’t recognize the number, please go read something else.
I believe that one should stretch himself from time to time. I am approaching yet another round birthday, almost there, in January 2014. You may think that’s faraway, but a friend of mine recently mentioned that he is already planning goals for 2014. I want to plan not one year, but a decade in advance, so I should probably get started!
Life is a set of periods
I take life as a set of time periods, with each period has a more or less obvious theme that guides the majority of actions taken.
Period zero I call **initiation**. During this period, you don’t really do things intentionally, but rather are guided by your family or put in circumstances that are organised in a certain way for you. Like pre-school or first grade at school.
The first real period where you have a say is a **collection period**. This is about sucking in knowledge and experiences, and not thinking twice about picking a fight or trying a crazy idea. Some friends I know would argue that this period lasts 10-20 years. Personally, I’d give it more (even twice as much), but it’s up to you.
After the “collection period” comes a **creation period**. All that collected experience and wisdom starts to burn inside you. It wants to get out. It wants to come to be used to create something bigger and permanent! Do you feel that?
This is not to say you didn’t create things in previous or following period, but here it emerges as the prevailing trait of your actions. You can’t help it, you must create! You still have to absorb knowledge and experiences, but the proportions and intentional efforts here are different. I’m here, in this period; hence my crazy goal. I hope you know where the number comes from by now (Hint: it’s a geeky number).
To finish my thoughts on “life periods”, the last one comes well in the future, at least for me, and I call it the **mentoring period**. That comes after you’ve learned, experimented, created and lived, so that you know yourself really well. You can then focus on passing on knowledge and experiences to others and helping them to move forward. I am not saying the periods cannot overlap but I see these four as major trend-lines of life.
I don’t know if you have the same feeling about life periods, but I would like to think that yes. If not, just let me know why not right here?
One more thing, not everyone will really pass through all periods, some people will never move past the initial two…guess why?
Also as my friend Jason noted, there is no rest and **relax period**, which he expected at the end. I think that such a period does not really exist. A “rest” is the natural opposite of “action” but it cannot be a period, because life is about moving forward. You can rest for a day, week or month or even a year but only to get enough energy and inspiration to move forward, otherwise you’d show treats of being dead-alive.
I am entering **creation period**
Lets focus on the plan now; there are several simple questions coming to mind when thinking about **creation period** start.
First of all — Creation of WHAT? Saying that it should be bigger and more permanent does not really help, so lets come back to it later. Second question popping out is HOW to make “WHAT” a reality with only two hands, two legs and whatever leftover amount of brain cells?
Maybe that’s why I’m starting this planning so early and making it public. Asking questions and getting your feedback might be extremely helpful :)
My WHAT is the Number
Major parameter for the next decade’s plan is fixed and I’ve already mentioned it. I plan to have positive impact with my doings on more than 314,159,265 people.
But as we are creatures of habit and by repeating the number I am slowly getting accustomed to the number and surprisingly also getting excited about it. If I could positively influence lives of so many people…it just feels good. Even thinking about it as a possibility.
I’m sure you all these questions already popped into your mind:
- How many people is that? Where to find them?
- What it means “positively influence someones life”?
- What can be the activity one can do to influence so many? (apart from coming up with pill agains obesity or inventing iPhone?)
Let’s just look at 3.14 number first
What can more than 314 million people represent?
- the town I come from can fit into this number exactly 260 times and the country I come from probably 26 times. So back there I won’t really stand much chance of success
- approximately 50% of European population (742 million)
- a little bit less than the whole South American population (406 million)
- the whole of North America is little more (355 million)
- of course, this is about 25% of the Chinese or Indian population (1.3 billion and 1.2 billion respectively)
- or more than 10% of the Asian population in general (4.3 billion)
- and slightly more than a third of the population of Africa (1.1 billion)
(Numbers taken from Wiki)
Look at that! When evaluated from a purely “numbers” perspective, it suddenly does not look so impossible or scary. What I see from the numbers is that there are enough people on each continent, so I can move easily (which I like) and that potential everywhere outside the Americas is so much higher!
I expect my area of positive influence to be part of some technology venture, or a non-profit organization connected with technology. I am really thinking about improvements in scale, so purely hands-on activities like the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders will not make big enough impact.
So numbers review — done!
What is “positive influence” ?
Let’s have a look at what “positively influence someone’s life” means! This definition will be critical in next iterations of the question HOW…?
I thought about this quite a while and since it is a critical part of the planning process I would like to hear your opinion on this. What do you think? What would a decent definition of areas in which positive change would be counted as “positive influence” be?
I could go on now, but I’d much rather hear from you — what would you count as a “positive influence on someone’s life”?
And I’ll be back next week with my definition and thoughts on in WHAT areas my efforts could produce such high impact for the next decade….
If you want to connect — tweet me @petrnew — looking forward to hear from you!
PS:
Don’t forget about little daily “positive influences” like improving the mood of a stranger by smiling at them in public transport. If you count that you’ll optimistically smile at least 10 people each day and you’ll get them to smile back as a proof of improving their mood, then it gets you up to 36,500 positively influenced people during a decade. Not bad…
