speaker 0:   0:00
It's the start of a new decade, the year 2020. This is one year after the setting of the original Blade Runner, which predicted lifelike humanoid artificial intelligence. We had flying personal vehicles and there was intergalactic space travel. This is four years after we were supposed to be zooming around on hoverboards like in back to the Future, to an almost two decades after everyone was stockpiling food and necessities, because the world was supposed to be thrown into a technological dark age due to every computer crashing a Y two k. Needless to say, we might not be the best of predicting the future, but we are great at imagining it. Our imaginations can create and destroy worlds. They can accomplish the impossible. They can even harness the power of time and space. Joseph Conrad, the author of Heart of Darkness, who is regarded as one of the greatest novelist to write in the English language, says this on Lee in men's imagination. Does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence? Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life. But what if we could tie our imagination to invention and creation? What if I told you there was a way to not only imagine, but to engineer your perfect life in the next couple episodes. Oh, describe exactly how to imagine your perfect life paired with a scientifically validated method for actualizing your dreams. I call this process dream engineering. How does our definition of success shape how we live our daily lives? Join me your host, Michael Baumann, as we create a life of success by exploring the cutting edge research in happiness, motivation, psychology, philosophy and more welcome to thrive, culture success into Debbie Millman on author, educator and one of the most influential designers working today created this method for realizing our dreams. Called the 10 Year Plan for a remarkable life, she has used his method both for herself back in 2005 and for countless number of students that she has taught since then. She describes the results as magical and even a little spooky. By 2015 nearly everything that she wrote down had come true. I actually heard about this tool on a Tim various podcast who was interviewing Debbie Millman at the time, so I decided to try it for myself in just two years, Almost every aspect of those dreams that I had written down have also began to be realized in my life. These are things like having the opportunity to travel and explore the world. My family now lives overseas in Shanghai, China, and we visited eight different countries just in this last year alone. And that includes places like Thailand and Papa, New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand, Spain and Italy. And I get to spend on average of five plus hours a day with my three year old son. I'm starting to learn a little bit of Mandarin and I'm taking up drawing again. They're all these things that I'm starting to do and starting to realize these dreams that I actually wrote down in this 10 year plan. And while I definitely don't believe this was the sole cause of the change that experienced, it did help point me in the right direction, and I love to share this tool with you. Obviously, this only works. If you actually do the exercise, I would highly highly encourage you look at your calendar for this week. Block out time to do this. There's no better time in the start of this new decade toe actually picture to envision what you want this next decade toe look like you don't need much to get started. Just get a paper or a piece of pen. You can even do it on your computer and print it out later. If you want that tangible called copy and and block out on uninterrupted section of time. So 2 to 3 hours if you can manage it, would probably be ideal to really dive into this and give it the, um, emphasis that it deserves. So here is how we can engineer your dreams. You were going to write down exactly what your life would look like in 10 years if you pursued everything you wanted with a complete expectation of success. So with no fear of failing, now write huge dream ghosts. Don't edit the's. Just write down everything you're thinking. Suspend all judgment that need to know how you'll accomplish this just right. Just dream. Let yourself go. Just be specific. Go into detail about these things. You can write in full sentences. If you want. You can write in bullet points. The key is just to write and not at it. the things that are coming to your mind. So now let's use the six different areas of our life that actually talked about in the last episode. So physical relation A ll mental, emotional, financial and spiritual areas. And then we can add in your environment and the experiences you wanna have as categories to help clarify this exercise picture with me. January 2030. I know it's crazy. That number sounds crazy, but that's why we're picturing it. What does your life look like in January 2030 in each one of these areas? So let's start with the environment. Because that's the easiest one to visualize his easiest one toe a picture. So, in your ideal life 10 years from now where you living? Are you in a house? Are you an apartment? Where's this located? Is it by the beach? Is it in the mountains? Is it in the city? You know, in what country is it? How big is it? How many rooms does this? How house have what are in those rooms. And I Would you encourage you individually? Picture each room. So what is your living room? Look like? Your bedroom, Your dining room your bathroom. Do you have a movie theater in there again? Just suspend judgment. Picture your ideal house, your ideal environment. What does that look like? And don't judge it. Just dream at this point. Now, what vehicles do you have? You know, what cars do you have? Do you have multiple cars? Sports cars? Do you have a boat or a yacht or a helicopter plane? And what clothes are you wearing? You know you have a Rolex watch or Chanel wardrobe. Do you have art? You know, famous art on the walls or a music studio Picture everything about your environment, that ideal things that you'd wanna have. Now it's important to move on to the relation, Alas, pecked of it. Picture. Who is with you in this environment, you know. Are you married? Do you have kids? You know what friends? What people are you associating with their spending most of your time with? Do you have pets running around? Now let's move on to the physical aspect of your body. So your health, your body, what does your body look like in 10 years? And even that question is kind of a scary question, cause we typically assume that it gets worse. And while there are challenges to getting older, there's also the opposite side of it where we can actually create what our body looks like her. The body we wanna have. You know what? What state of health are you enjoying? What activities can you do with your body? Are you pain free? You know, if have you, you know, wanted to complete that marathon. Were you able to do that in these last 10 years of that Iron Man? Or have you been able to lose the weight you've always wanted to lose? Are you working out? Are you exercising consistently? What are you eating? You know, maybe you're getting massages, you know, a couple of times a week or Manny Petty's think about your whole health and your body and picture that idea what you'd ideally wanted to have in 10 years. Now, on the mental side, you know, this has to do with our learning and our accomplishment. Did you learn a new language or learn to dance or seeing Or, you know, maybe you've always had that fear of speaking in front of people. Maybe that's what you learned or now you can, you know, tell funny stories and carrying on interesting conversations or draw or paint or playing instruments. And you know, what books are you reading? How often do you get to have time to read books? You know, that's all aspects of that mental picture of your ideal life 10 years from now and then you can ask questions on the emotional side. So are you able to break like, cyclic patterns of thoughts or emotions that you have in your life, or are you able to pause and not snap or lash out at when somebody says something that may not sit well with you are you would be more patient and loving? Do you have more joy and energy? Are you more present in every motion in every moment? So what do your emotions look like? What would you want your emotions to look like 10 years from now and then on that spiritual side of things or that your purpose, your career again think about what makes you come alive? What would you love to be doing in 10 years? What would it feel like? Work. I'll just bring you joy to do it Or like if money wasn't an issue at all, what would you be doing in what could you study and learn about for the next 10 years and not get tired of it? Picture that picture, what that looks like, what that feels like if you were to live, actually get the opportunity to live that. And then now we move on to the financial aspect because that the financial aspect correlates directly into all these other things. Now we want to ask, How much do we want to earn in a year? Maybe it's 50,000. Maybe it's 100,000 or a 1,000,000. Plus, you have to ask that question. Why do I want to earn that much and that why actually comes down to the other areas of our life? Maybe we can live those other areas of our life without earning ah, $100,000 a year. Or maybe we need that much, you know, we can see. But we have to create that intentional life first and get a picture of that and then actually look at why am I earning this money? We can have these nebulous financial goals as far as how much we want to earn Ah, year or retirement. Actually, don't correlate with the ideal life that we wanna have. So get that ideal life. First picture that ideally first, then start calculating. How much money would I need? Thio? Achieve that. You know, if you have a company, you can incorporate what revenue goals you have for your company or what you want your net worth to be. You know, when you retire, how much money would want would you want to retire with? You know, how much do you want to say for your kid's college? And as a part of this, you have to add the aspect of the experience that you want tohave in life because these are the things that make our life rich and make our life full and make it interesting that give it variety. So what experiences have you always wanted? 1/2 what's on your bucket list, You know, 10 years out down the road, what will you have done? You know, maybe you wanted to travel, You know what places have you always wanted to go? You know, maybe wanted to attend a Broadway play or, you know, a famous concert or you wanted to skydive or learn how to serve for, you know, race a Lamborghini on the autobahn. Think about those experiences that you wanna have and picture 10 years down the road, you having done that. And as a part of those experiences you're gonna you can also picture. How do you want to contribute to the world? You know, you have these 10 year span. What do you want to accomplish, what you want to give back in a decade. In 10 years? Maybe that's helping homeless people or victims of sex trafficking. Maybe that's preserving the environment. Or, you know, working Thio. Eliminate racism and, you know, could even be negotiating on the world stage as, ah, world leader of politician and using that as the platform for, you know, making the change that you want to see. So now that you have these different areas, go back to each one of those goals and give a timeline on each one. So, for instance, let's say, you know, under the health area, you might have said, I want to lose £30 put a realistic time frame on that right, a number beside that goal. So If you want to do it within a year, put a one beside that goal. Or let's say maybe in the financial area, you wanna have a $1,000,000 in investments. Maybe that's a five year goal for some people or a 20 year goal for other people. But write that number beside that goal. Now choose the most important one year goal in each of those areas. The goal where, if you accomplished it, you would give you the most excitement or make the year feel like such a success. And right why you're absolutely 100% committed to making that goal a reality this year. What that does is that builds the necessity, that sense of urgency around, why this is the year that you're going to accomplish these goals. Friedrich Nicci says. He has a y toe live conveyor. Almost any how so. We want to find the wise. We want to find the deeper reasons for why these goals are important because that's what's gonna motivate you when you're just in the grind. When things aren't as exciting as at the start of the year, Toyota actually developed an incredibly powerful tool that they used to trace the root cause of the problems within their manufacturing process. And it's called the Five Wise. Now we can take this same tool and apply it to each one of these areas. So, for example, let's say you wanted to lose £30 this year. You begin with asking yourself Why is losing £30 important to me? Why is that goal? Whatever it is important to me and your answer might be, I wanna look better. I want to feel better. So why is looking looking better and feeling better important to you? And you might say, Well, I want to be more confident or have more self esteem and you continue to ask these wise and it continues toe unwrap these layers until you're getting down to Maur of a deep emotional reason for why this is important. So you ask that question again. You know why is being more confident important to you? Why is having more self esteem important? You might say something like, I feel like when I'm in control of my body, I'm in control of my life and all the other parts of my life. I feel like I can accomplish I can do anything that I set my mind to. You keep asking, Why is being in control of your body and feeling like you could do anything you set your mind to important? You might say something like It frees up all the mental energy and the space that I've taken, just dwelling on what I think other people think about me and allows me to be my best self. And you asked that final why? Why is being your best self important? It allows you to be, you know, the best father, the best mother that I can be to to show up, to be present with my family, but also pretty perform and achieve at a high level in my work in my career, when you get past those first couple wise and you get down to those last you know, 2 to 3. That's where you really dig deep, and you get that emotional reason for why those goals are important. You and that's what's gonna motivate you when things are really hard. Now you might be thinking this exercise takes a lot of time, and it can. It can take a lot of time with The question that I would have you ask yourself is if you achieved the perfect life that you've always wanted to live, Was it worth taking 2 to 3 hours to actually picture that to imagine what that life would be like? And all of us would say Absolutely yes. You know, there's no question that the time investment would be worth it to picture allies it, so to picture it, So do that, you know, set aside time this week to do that. Now we take that on a big level, looking at what are ideal kind of life would be like and how we break it down to the perfect day. So we're picturing what the perfect day would look like in January of 2030. Starting from when you wake up. What's your perfect morning routine? You know, if you have kids, you have to kind of factor that in as well, cause you're perfect. Might I have to also include the kids that you have, and then down to the activities that you do in your perfect day? You know, all the way to when you shut your eyes to go to seep right out every single thing that you would picture for your perfect day again. Don't edit this. Just write anything that comes to your mind what the perfect day would look like without putting judgment on it without necessarily having to figure out how you'll accomplish it at this point. And Debbie Millman actually says, Just put your whole heart into it and right like there's no tomorrow, right? Like your life depends on it because it does. Now there's one more step you need to take, and this is probably the most important step of all. Tony Robbins says. Never leave the site of a goal without first taking some form of positive action towards it's attainment. So we have this perfect life, and you have the top one year goal in each of the six categories, along with the five wise that you've developed for why it's important to you now. What you need to do is think about the 1st 2 to 3 steps that you can take today, or at least within this week, to start to build momentum around these goals. It's so important to not lose that energy and excitement that you have around this ideal life by not taking the steps and building the momentum that you need today. So to sum up the dream engineering process, set aside 2 to 3 hours ideally, and write what your perfect life would look like in each of these six areas. So relation Aly physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually and financially, along with the environment that you're in the experiences that you wanna have in these next 10 years. Then choose the top one year goal in each category. Build necessity, build urgency around it by writing those five wise digging deep into that emotion. Reason for why you're going to achieve that this year and then write your perfect day from start to finish from when you wake up all the way toe when you go to bed remembering not to judge it, don't edit what you're doing. And then in the next episode, I will share the scientifically validated method to take these dreams and actually to make them reality, to take them from the realm of imagination and visualization into actionable and realistic plans. I hope to see you back for another episode of Thrive Culture Success Engineering with your host, Michael Baumann. If you enjoy this show. It would mean a lot to me if you left a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts. It really does help people find the show until next time. Thank you for listening.