Discover Your Dream Job Today! Part 1

Know What You Want!

To achieve that, there’s only one place to start that’s inside your mind.

Creating a vision and a mission of what you want out of life will provide you with some direction and momentum to move forward and find your dream job.

If you have laid out your goal and a plan with a realistic and worthy vision for your life ahead, you will notice how differently you perceive and react to things.

A compelling vision will make you feel good about yourself. Also, it leaves you with a clear mind, which allows you to make rational career choices and decisions and fit them in your scheme of things, keeping the bigger picture in mind.

Ask yourself the following question:

What do I really want to get out of life?

A true mission has to express your purpose for existence.

Here’s a series of questions for you to ask yourself. These questions will probe your mind and help you get valuable insights. You can aim at some soul searching and searching for answers to those unanswered questions.

Take the time now, and spend 30 minutes answering them before you move on.

• When you were a child, what did you want to be “When you grew up?”

• Name three people who have had the biggest influence on your life and why?

• If you could do anything for a living and get paid whatever you wanted, what would you do?

• Name your top three achievements of your life so far?

• What was so special about them?

• When you are at your most happiest in life? What are you doing?

• Name three people that you admire the most?

• Why do you admire them? What characteristics and qualities do they have?

• Have you ever done anything for anyone less fortunate than yourself?

• If yes, what was it? If no, why not?

• What are your greatest strengths?

• What could you do in life to maximize your strengths?

• Is there anything that you would be willing to put everything on the line for?

• What would it be and why?

• If you could have your time over again, what would you have done so far?

• What results are you currently having in your life, which you are pleased with?

• What results are you currently having in your life which you are not pleased with?

• If you could pass on a piece of wisdom to the whole world that you have learned in your life to date, what would it be?

• What do you value the most in your life?

• What would you really like to do with your life?

This exercise will get you thinking … really thinking…

Answer these questions honestly, that’s very important, or exercise would be either futile or the results misleading.

We all have had dreams and aspiration while growing up, but somehow we lose them as we get caught up in the wheel of life.  Our aspirations take a back seat and our commitments and responsibilities take over.

Now is the time to start from scratch again and achieve that heavenly feeling called contentment!

Take a glance over your answers to these questions and then move on to the questions that follow.

Q. The purpose of my life is to …….

Writing a mission statement can be a very enriching experience and it is better to think it through and not rush through it. It’s your very purpose of existence that you are laying down after all!

If possible you should try and get away from your routine environment.

Go for a walk, or take a short break - your mission in life is far too important to be skimmed over.

When people lack a mission in life, they tend to just have materialistic goals and want “things”. Not that it is wrong. Material things can only serve as a means but confusing the means to be the end can create problems later on.

Here’s an example.

Charles, a 55-year old bachelor, had till now thought he had lived a full life. His glass factories are now spread across six countries, churning out more and more money. He has properties across the globe, and lives life as he wants to.

But something happened when he became 55 years old. He discovered he had cancer, a brain tumor that will only give him 6 more months to live. Undergoing treatments, he was cut off from the web of activities and people he was previously involved in.

During this period he met some people who were also suffering from the same disease as he was. But his ‘new’ friends had other problems. They were actively making plans as to what they should do in the next six or seven months so that their family will miss them less.

It was thus suddenly one day that Charles realized he had nothing to leave to anyone. The Managing Director of his company had as such been the one running his business and he will continue to do so.

His passing away was not going to make a difference to anyone….

That was a really sad realization, but there was not much now that Charles could do.

You might not understand the full meaning of Charles’s realization, however, the bottom lines are ‘what difference has our life made…what will we be leaving behind for our family, society, world?’

If it was nothing much, then how do we say our life had been a success?

If you are going to end up with superficial goals, they might make you happy in the present but when you have achieved it all, you still might end up asking yourself “Is that all there is?”

We have time in our hands now, and we can make a difference.

There’s another exercise to help you plan. How about penning down your obituary?

Yes, it might seem a little too early to write that, but penning down what you want the world to remember you by can really help you set a higher bar for yourself.

This is an ideal way to get you to think about what you want to do in your life time.

As you look back on your life, you may find that your goals and desires may have been a bit skewed. Hang on! This is how the revelations will come through and get your life in perspective for you.

Instances which you brush off as usual happenings in your life, might strike out and appear in a different light if you look at them this way. Make sure your priorities are in place.

For starters, answer these…

• What do you want to be remembered for when you pass on?

• What has your life been about?

• Have you made any difference in others lives?

This is where we end Part 1.  Hope you found some answers, and things are becoming clearer and in focus.

Coming up in Part 2 - Defining Success

Free For All - Why Giving It Away Makes Sense

Here’s  an article that I found interesting that discusses a new trend of giving away instead of tossing it in the garbage so next time you decide you don’t want something anymore freecyle it!

First watch the video and please think before you throw anything out.

Free for All—Recycling Unwanted Machines

Just in time to save cash-strapped consumers comes a movement to encourage “giving away usable unwanted items to others instead of depositing them in landfills”. (Wikipedia) Called “freecycling” or “free recycling”, this concept offers a socially conscious, environmentally responsible way to eliminate overhead.

Many of us have seen perfectly good furniture and other items set out at the curb for the garbage men to take. Some of us “went shopping” at the curbs, when we were in college.

Registered in the United States, The Freecycle Network (TFN), sometimes known as Freecycle, is a non-profit organization. TFN has organized a worldwide network of “gifting” groups: With a worldwide online registry, including groups in Brazil, Columbia, Singapore, and Slovakia, the organization coordinates the creation of local groups and forums for individuals and non-profits which offer and receive free items for reuse or recycling. Promoting gift economics as a motivating cultural outlook, the official tagline of TFN is: “Changing the world one gift at a time”.

As of February 2006, TFN passed the 2 million member mark; it has a global organization of over four thousand local chapters. As of this writing, the membership was an impressive 6,626,000 in 4,726 communities across the globe. Hundreds of similar groups worldwide have replicated TFN’s original idea. TFN now has a number of corporate sponsors, including its first, Waste Management, Inc. For information about a community near you, visit http://www.freecycle.com.

A wide variety of products are freecycled, from computers to copy machines, from televisions to toasters, from food to fuel to cars to paper goods. Whatever you have that you want to dispose of, there is someone who can make good use of it.

Another, similar group is www.takemeimFREE.com. Started by an executive who wanted to eliminate excess warehouse space and did not want the items to end up in a landfill, this group believes that reusing items is “good for the economy, the environment, and all of us”.

Not only does freecycling make sense, but we believe this movement will gain momentum and grow rapidly, fueled by the needs of individuals and businesses to do more with less.
Source: “The Herman Trend Alert,” by Roger Herman and Joyce Gioia, Strategic Business Futurists. (800) 227-3566 or http://www.hermangroup.com. The Herman Trend Alert is a trademark of The Herman Group, Inc.”