Living my dream life! 🤯
Recently, I came across an old photo on my hard disk which completely blew my mind. Before I show you the photo, let me tell you a story.
Back in 2017, when I was working at a corporate job and considering applying to B schools (I’d already taken the GMAT), I was very unhappy and confused about the path that lay ahead of me. When I imagined life after B school, it didn’t seem to excite me, and I wasn’t sure if spending so much time and money into going to B school was a sensible idea when I wasn’t 100% sure of it.
To help sort this confusion, I decided to meet a career counsellor on my dad’s advice. In my first session with her, before we even started discussing things, the counsellor gave me a piece of paper and asked me to describe what my ideal career would be like (and asked me not to hold myself back, as it was just an imagination afterall).
Now let me show you the picture I was talking about.
I don’t even have words to describe how reading this makes me feel because this EXACTLY describes my life right now. I make more money now than I’ve ever made in my life, I can work from anywhere and at any time, my job allows me to express my creativity in the best way possible and since last year, I’ve traveled to Bali, Singapore, Dubai, Czech Republic, Kazakhstan, US and lots of places within India (and the best part is that I didn’t have to pay for most of those trips because brands sponsored my trips). I’m literally living my dream life right now and I didn’t even realize it!
Mind you, my life back when I’d written this down was far from what it is today; I was working at a job I didn’t particularly love, had no freedom in terms of location and time, I didn’t control how much money I made because I had a fixed salary, and didn’t have the ability to travel much because I had very limited work leaves, and most of them were spent visiting family back home. I did have a YouTube channel then but had no intention of making a career out of it.
How did I go from where I was back in 2017 to where I am now in 2020, living the kind of life I described to be my ideal life (of course, minus the pandemic and all that comes with it)?
The answer, as simple as it sounds, lies in putting your dreams and goals down on a piece of paper. Somehow, this simple act of writing down your goals etches them into your subconscious mind, and makes you take involuntary actions to work towards those goals. Putting it down on paper makes it seem like this impossible dream could actually exist in real life, and sets the motion to you actually achieving them somewhere down the line. Of course, other factors like hard work and perseverance cannot be ignored, but it all starts with putting your goals down in writing.
I speak from personal experience, but there have been studies that show that people who very vividly describe or picture their goals are anywhere from 1.2 to 1.4 times more likely to successfully accomplish them.
So if I could give you a piece of advice on getting a step closer to living your dream life, it would be to take an hour out, grab a pen and notebook and use your imagination to think of what your dream life would look like. When you’re done, re-read that a few times, visualise living that dream life now and how happy/excited/surreal that would make you feel, and then the important part - forget about it and get down to work keeping that vision in your mind.
I’m sure you’ll be living your dream life before you know it. :)