Life Mapping: A Path to Success

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

Origin: Where you are.

A map has a origination point. Your origin is where you are right now. Many people, when asked to introduce themselves would say, "Hi, I'm John and I am a 17-year old, senior high school student." It does not tell you about who John is; it only tells you about his present position. To gain understanding about yourself, you need to look closely at your values, beliefs, and principles aside from your, professional, cultural, economic, and civil status. Furthermore, you can also reflect on your experiences to give you ideas on your good and not-so-good traits, strengths, knowledge, skills, and weaknesses. Upon review, John realized that he was highly motivated, service-oriented, generous, but impatient. His inclination was in the medical field. Furthermore, he believed that life must have a purpose, and that wars are harmful to human dignity.

Destination: A clear vision of what we want to become.

"Who do I want to be?" this is your vision. Now it is critical that you know yourself so that you would have a clear idea of who you want to be; and the things you want to change whether they are habits, attitudes, or points of view. If you barely know yourself, then your vision and targets for the future would also be unclear. Your destination should cover all the aspects of your being: the physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual. Continuing John's story, after he defined his values, beliefs, and principles in life, he decided that he wanted to have a life commitment in serving his fellowmen.

Vehicle: Your Personal Mission

A vehicle is the means by which you can reach your destination. It can be analogized to your mission or purpose in life. To a great extent, your mission would depend on what you know about yourself. Bases on John's self-assessment, he decided that he was suited to become a doctor, and that he wanted to become one. His chosen vocation was a medical doctor. Describing his vision-mission completely: it was to live a life dedicated to serving his fellowmen as a doctor in conflict-areas.

Travel Bag: Your skills, knowledge, and attitude.

Food, drinks, medicines, and other traveling necessities are all included in the bag. When applying this concept to your life map, you also bring with you certain skills, knowledge, and attitudes. These determine your competence and help you in attaining your 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 measures of success. John realized that he needed to gain skills and professional knowledge on medicine so that he could become a doctor. He knew that he was a bit impatient with people so he realized that this was something she wanted to 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. So, 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 measurable, specific, realistic, attainable, 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. Going back to John as an example, he identified the following landmarks in his life map: completing a bachelor's degree in biology by the age of 21; completing medicine by the age of 27; earning his specialization in infectious diseases by the age of 30; getting deployed in local public hospitals of their town by the age of 32; and serving as doctor in war-torn areas by the age of 35.

Expect Turns, Potholes, and Detours.

The reason for your life map is to minimize quick, and spur of the moment decisions that may cause you to lose your way. But oftentimes our plans are modified along the way due to some inconveniences, delays, and other situations beyond our control. Like in any path, there are turns, detours, and potholes thus; we must plan for them and adjust accordingly.