Take a brief journey with me to the year of 2026. We are seven years older. Look around! Are you in the same place you were in 2019? Are you still doing the same things you were doing in 2019? Which goals and dreams from 2019 have been achieved? What things would you have thought would have changed by now? Looking back, are you pleased with what you have accomplished since 2019? Are there new people in your life? Are you in debt? Are you out of debt completely? Are you a parent or grandparent? Are you married, divorced, widowed? Do you live in the same house, or the same city? Are you dead or alive?
While we cannot know what our lives will look like seven years from now, we can possibly measure our pace by looking at the past seven years to see how much ground we have covered. If you are not pleased with the pace of your journey, now is the time to take off the weights and pick up the pace. Let’s look forward again to 2026, but this time let us stretch our imagination. Now that our imagination has taken us to a place we had only dreamed of, let us plan backwards to 2025, 2024, 2023…, until we get to next month, next week, and tomorrow.
Our imagination allows us to dream and think forward, plan backwards from the future to the present, and live our way back to the future with that plan. When we imagine some of the details of our future, we give ourselves a destination or goal. In order to be successful, we discipline ourselves to plan our work and work our plan.