Success is more than economic gains, titles, and degrees. Planning for your business success is about mapping out all the aspects of your life. Similar to a map, you need to define the following details: origin, destination, vehicle, backpack, landmarks, and route.

Origin: Who you are

A map has a starting point. Your origin is who you are right now. Most people when asked to introduce themselves would say something like this, “Hi, my name is Tatiana and I am a 17-year old, senior high school student.” This statement does not tell you about who Tatiana is, but only tells you her present occupation. To get a better perspective about yourself, you need to look closely at your beliefs, values, and principles aside from your economic, professional, cultural, and civil status. Moreover, you can also reflect on your past experiences to give you an insight on your good and not-so-good traits, skills, knowledge, strengths, and weaknesses. Upon introspection, Tatiana realized that she was highly motivated, generous, service-oriented, and impatient. Her inclination was in the biological-medical field. Furthermore, she believed that life must serve a purpose, and that war and fighting were destructive to human dignity.

Destination: A vision of who you want to be

“Who do I want to be and what can I do?” this is a stepping stone to your vision. Now it is important that you know yourself so that you may have a clearer idea of who you want to be, and the things you want to change whether they are attitudes, habits, or points of view. If you hardly know yourself, then your vision and targets for the future will also be unclear. Your future destination should cover all aspects of your life: the physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. Continuing Tatiana’s story, after she defined her beliefs, values, and principles in life, she decided that she wanted to have a life dedicated in serving humanity.

Vehicle: Your Mission

A vehicle is the means by which you can reach your destination. It can be analyzed to meet your mission or vocation in life. To a great extent, your mission would depend on what you know about yourself. Bases on Tatiana’s self-assessment, she decided that she was suited to be a doctor, and that she wanted to become one. Her chosen business vocation was a medical doctor. Describing her vision-mission fully: it was to live a life dedicated to serving humanity as a doctor in conflict-areas.

Travel Bag: Your knowledge, skills, and attitude

Food, drinks, medicines, and other traveling necessities are contained in a bag. Applying the same concept to your life, you will aquire certain knowledge, skills, and attitudes. These determine your competence and help you in attaining your dream and vision. Given such, there is a need for you to assess what knowledge, skills, and attitudes you have at present and what you need to gain along the way. This two-fold assessment will give you insights on your landmarks or measures of success. Tatiana realized that she needed to gain professional knowledge and skills on medicine so that she could become a doctor. She knew that she was a bit impatient with people so she realized that this was something she wanted to focus on and change.

Landmarks and Route: S.M.A.R.T. objectives

Landmarks confirm if you are on the right track while the route determines the travel time. Thus, in planning out your life, you also need to have landmarks and a route. These landmarks are your measures of success. These measures must be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time bound. Thus you cannot set two major landmarks such as earning a master’s degree and a doctorate degree within a period of three years, since the minimum number of years to complete a master’s degree is two years. Now going back to Tatiana as an example, she identified the following landmarks in her business success life map: completing a bachelor’s degree in biology by the age of 21; completing medicine by the age of 27; specializing in infectious diseases by the age of 30; getting deployed in local public hospital by the age of 32; and serving as doctor in war-torn areas by the age of 35.

Anticipate Turns, Detours, and Potholes

The purpose of your life map is to minimize hasty and spur-of-the-moment decisions that can make you lose your way. But oftentimes our plans are modified along the way due to some inconveniences, trial and errors, delays, and other situations beyond our control. Like in any path, there are turns, detours, and pot holes, however you must anticipate them and adjust accordingly.

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