My goals.
For this post, I want to focus on “Step 2: Hello, It’s a Marathon and a Sprint: Get a Grip on Your Future.”
Here are the questions Lapin recommends you focus on to figure out your goals:
What do you want to do with your career?
Do you want to own your own home?
Do you want to retire early or not at all?
Do you need to fund your children’s college educations?
Do you need to care for your aging parents?
How much money do you need to put away to get to the end objective and how much do you need to have at each yearly increment to accomplish those plans?
Personally, I’m stuck on numero uno as I can really answer the rest of the questions simply.
Do you want to own your own home? No
Do you want to retire early? Yes
Do you need to fund your children’s college educations? No
Do you need to care for your aging parents? No
What really matters to me?
I’ve gone back and forth throughout my life about having kids. Ever since I was 17, when I first started thinking about whether or not I wanted them, I haven’t been able to decide. But that’s the answer: If I’m not sure, I probably shouldn’t have them.
But what does matter to me?
Every so often I do a values exercise to determine what my values are. To do this, find a list of value words and narrow down which ones are most important to you to ten. Then narrow the list of ten down again to five.
The most recent time I did this was a year ago and my top five list is:
Beauty
Passion
Courage
Freedom
Growth
If I did it again today, maybe these would be different, but this is what I’ve got for now.
Beauty, Passion, Courage, Freedom, Growth
What does living these values look like, then?
I’ve struggled with what I want to do with my life a lot since I graduated from college over 10 years ago. I've read a number of books about finding yourself and finding your purpose, but nothing really spoke to me. I do the activities in the book and leave them understanding what I want to do just as much as when I started.
In my journal where I did the values activity, I also wrote down a future biography and a personal mission statement. I’m not sure where I got the idea to do this.
My personal mission statement reads:
To live a simple, creative, and beautiful life. To bring beauty to others and freedom to myself.
Bam, I love that.
A few key parts of my future biography say that I’m a homesteader and a photographer. So, I want to do something creative. This is a good first step, but doesn’t tell me what I should do with my life.
That’s when I heard about the concept of Ikigai.
Source: medium.com
Ikigai is the concept that when you combine what you love with what the world needs, what you’re good at, and what you can be paid for you’ve found your reason for being, or your ikigai. At least, the ikigai that’s associated with your career. Ikigai can be anything, even something anti-social like revenge if it gives you life meaning. In this case, I’m talking about the career-based ikigai and the Venn diagram, as shown here.
Lately, I’ve noticed that people can monetize anything (especially, weirdly, their trauma), so that takes care of what I can be paid for. And the world needs beauty, so there’s what the world needs. I think as I get older, it feels more and more like I’m running out of time to start something new. I try to tell myself that the time is going to pass anyway, so I should just do the thing, but I still hesitate. And I know that student loan debt is considered “good” debt. What beautiful thing do I want to study and bring to the world? I guess I need to journal about it.
Money, honey
Let’s say I never figured out my passion and career path and therefore want to retire ASAP. How much money do I need to put away to get there and what does that look like on a yearly basis?
I have used a few retirement calculators and I think the Charles Schwab retirement calculator is the most straight forward. With this calculator, I’ve determined that if I start saving $1000.00 per month, or $12,000.00 per year, the earliest I can retire is at the age of 58. But the thing I like about this calculator is that it’s easy to play with different numbers and it’ll tell you what you need to do to get there. As far as I can tell, the absolute earliest I can retire is age 52 with my current income and living situation. Basically, I need to start making more money if I want to retire sooner. Boo.
But it’s good to know.
Are you doing what you love or are you still trying to figure out what you want to do with your life, no matter your age? Let me know in the comments!
Talk soon, Madeleine