Planning the Trip Called 'Life'

How many times have you sat down to teach your kids something, and in the process, they teach you something instead? I’ll admit, this just happened with my 16-year-old daughter.

It was a typical night at the dinner table with my kids, when I started talking to my daughter about her dream of being a photographer. She’s extremely creative and I know she’d do well. I also know the importance of supporting dreams, even when her dream is to travel, like all-over-the-world-travel, while doing photography, and leave her parents halfway across the world.

So, to focus on her dream, I asked her look up three photographers to aspire to be like in her career. I also asked her, what is the single most important component of going on a trip?

Her response: planning.

I realized how profound this was, and to put it more sophisticatedly, the most crucial component is:

KNOW WHERE YOU ARE GOING

You need to have your destination defined, otherwise you’ll go in circles. You can change your destination or you can choose a different destination, but at the onset of your journey, you have to have one identified. With my daughter wanting to be a world-traveling photographer, identifying examples of successful people to look up to in the field will help her research and plan the journey to her destination.

My encouragement to you is to dream big, as we close on 2015 and look to 2016. Not only dream big, but identify your destination. The destination could be a physical achievement, a new job, a new habit, or breaking an old one. Whatever it may be, you might not get to your destination in 2016, or even the year after that, but I can confidently say that you can begin the journey there, and the journey is usually just as rewarding as the arrival.