I’ve historically experienced a significant shift in my lifestyle, priorities, and thinking every seven years or so.
Based on that schedule, I’m likely to see another such shift around a year from now.
Between these fairly radical recalibrations, I tend to undertake minor to moderate situational and orientational renovations every few months.
At the base of these lower-grade overhauls are what I think of as interior purpose statements: journal entries, basically, but focused on how I’d like my life to look in the near-future.
These entries differ from my normal scribblings because rather than documenting things that’ve happened or thoughts I’m having, I paint a picture of what I’d like life to be, how I’d like to feel, the work I’d like to be doing, the people I’d like to spend more time with—things like that.
These entries tend to be a bit fluffy because figuring out the specifics is what comes next. The initial effort is cobbling together a foundational concept, a prophetic vision, that will then inform my practical efforts and plans.
Lacking this sort of loose blueprint, I find it’s easy to optimize in the wrong direction and to start building habits and making investments that seem to make sense in isolation but which don’t support the larger, holistic reality I’m trying to coalesce around me.
Tweaks are to be expected along the way, as are revamps to plans and projects that didn’t take me where I’d hoped they would.
As long as I have that blurry sense of a destination, though, I can nudge and regulate without having to pause for a wholesale reassessment; my imagined next-step is hazy enough to encompass and incorporate all sorts of changes.
I recently read an essay about vision papers, which are broad, at times narrative ideas about how certain technologies or understandings might evolve (as opposed to cold, fact-focused explanations of where we are and where we might go).
These papers tend to be a bit vague in their specifics because the idea isn’t to prove something is right or describe a hard-set reality, but to share a vision and communicate a what-if.
Because of that indefinite nature, these papers frequently go on to inform major discoveries and even scientific movements—not because they’re good science, but because they’re compelling maybes that serve as imagination-scaffoldings for whatever comes next.
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