Should you have a vision plan?
I think, for me, vision plans make sense because it’s your way of creating a guide towards your ideal life.
I think your ideal life is the life you hope to have — the perfect day and perfect environment.
For some, that might mean make a lot of money, live in a big house, be financially stable. Others may say, have good work-life balance and live in a decent sized condo or house eventually.
In order to guide you to that ideal life, I think vision plans are good because it can help in creation the action plan.
So if you want to live in a $300,000 and down payments are usually 20%, you need to save $60,000. So say you want to save that amount within the next 10 years, that means you need to save $6000/year or $500/month. I think vision plans can help in execution because in order to get to saving that $60,000, you need to start saving today.
Also works for a job. Say you want to get certain level at a company. You can chart out — I’ve to do 2 years as an associate, then maybe 2 years as an analyst, then Associate Director for 2 years, then Director for 2 years, Global Manager for 3 years, VP of Marketing for 3 years and then making you can be a CMO. You can say maybe I’m 14 years away from being a CMO.
Having benchmarks of where you hope to be at some points is always good. You can reflect in 2 years, did I get the analyst role?
In this way, vision planning can be a good reflecting point? Am I close to my goals? I have afriend who likes to hook up a lot but wants to be married by 32. Well, at some point, maybe 28, he’ll have to let go of the hook up lifestyle and start being more serious if you wants to get married by 32.
Realize they’re are uncontrolled variables. I think Covid taught us we can’t always plan for anything. Right? A lot of people had Covid plans like weddings and then those got postponed. Many people and businesses couldn’t prepare for a year of pandemic type state.
A person I had on the podcast, Jenny Lisk, lost her husband to brain cancer and started a community for Widows. That certainly wasn’t in her vision plan. For me, I’ve lost 3 people to suicide in the last 5 years and started a podcast on mental health as a result. I know people whose parents’ healths have failed and they’ve moved to be a caretaker.
You may also be in that analyst role and realize you don’t want to be in that industry and change industries, and move from marketing all together.
I’ll also say this, make the North Star as extreme as possible.
You know, don’t limit yourself to realistic. Push yourself.
This way, even if you come up short, you’ll have made a lot of progress.
CMO is the north star and you get to Global Marketing Manager, that’s not bad.
Understand it’s through pushing ourselves that we make any progress. It’s by trying to get a 6 minute mile that I can get my 10 minute mile from 10 to say 8 minute mile.
So, overall, I think vision plans can be helpful guide and so I’m an advocate for making them.
But obviously, as we know, life is unpredictable so just know that variables can change and you may change as well.