A life without some life strategy is like a boat without a rudder.
The boat will definitely get you somewhere due to the forces of wind and water currents, but where you end up may not be where you really want to go. For that reason, it is important to give life some direction to end up where you want to be in life in the future. Strategies are our most powerful tools for creating great life. They help us see the world in the right way to solve the important problems of our field.
Most of us are not what we could be. We are less. We have great capacity. But most of it is dormant; most is undeveloped. As long as we take our thinking for granted, we don’t do the work required for improvement.
Strategy is determining where you are now, where you want to go, and then how to get there. It’s the art of developing and implementing specific actions and decisions that will enable the growth of life.
Strategies are something like mental best practices. People doing great work, then, are not necessarily faster or smarter than others doing mediocre work. They do great things because they have changed themselves to see the world in a certain way.
They notice the things which help them articulate and solve significant problems, and they ignore the rest.
Building the right strategies into our lives is important because through them we begin to notice the right things unconsciously, freeing more brain power for the novel parts of our problems.
The problems of deciding what is relevant and what is deserving of our attention is one of the most difficult in our lives. If we were perfectly able to cut the noise out of our lives, focusing only on what was important, most of us would be living far differently than we do now.
Unfortunately, we often don’t know what noise is and what is signal, or how to remove the noise or act on the signal. A good set of strategies help us solve these problems.
One great thing about having a good set of strategies is that when we apply the appropriate ones to the question at hand, the choice of tactics becomes much easier. Strategies work together to build a set of constraints which help us choose the right tool for the job. Without them, it would basically be working randomly, via trial-and-error method.
You will discover that when you have a life strategy that has a 15–20-year horizon, you will be continually refining your life strategy as you gain more knowledge and experience in your life. Additionally, you will also learn to fine-tune opportunities as they present themselves, which further enhances the fulfilment of your life strategy.
What was the last good, positive thing that happened to you?
Perhaps it made you smile or dance around the room or maybe even want to shout it from the rooftops... and think of the strategy behind.
Dr Anchan C K
The writer is an international adviser
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