Building roads is a skill that we are both very good and very bad at. It is the longest project we work on in our lives. Yet it’s very rarely noticed. We don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it but spend a lot of time doing it.
What am I referring to? It’s building our lives.
What they don’t teach us in school is that every day when we wake up and join the world we are getting ready to add a small piece towards the outcome of our life. Every day. Whether we sleep in all day or use our time wisely, we continue to work on building the road of our life.
Some days are easier than others. But our work never ends.
So if we work on the road of our life every day, why is it that you say that we are very bad at it? What is it that makes us so bad at it?
It’s that we never draw a map of where the destination of our road will take us. We randomly go through life, bouncing around as if we are in a pinball machine, lucky to finish our day without getting hurt.
The interesting thing is that we can change the direction of our life’s road MULTIPLE times as we age. To do this, we have to decide where we need to or want to go next. Maybe we have always wanted to play piano and now decide to start. Maybe we have committed to stop drinking or to lose weight or to retire by the age of 55.
You see, thinking about where we want to end up ahead of time, is the quickest way to get there. Making the change in direction of our life’s road might be difficult. It may need us to learn new skills. We may need to change our perspective. We may need the help of a teacher, a coach or a mentor to help us see ourselves better to approach things in a different way than before.
The important thing to remember is that we are doing this work, of building our life’s road, every day beginning when we wake up. Knowing where we want to get to next, massively improves our chance of getting there.