Life engineering, or the act of building the life you want instead of accepting what you’re given, is something everyone should know. But especially students, who find themselves at a crossroads that will determine the pathway they’re on for the next 40 or 50 years.
Effective life engineering is about seeing your ultimate success and then building the plans and actions needed to get you there. In the following article, we’ll be hitting five tips that’ll help you do this effectively. Let’s get started.
1. Define Your Dreams
Your dreams are what drive you. They all start out maybe a little unrealistic. But that’s okay. You’re finding your way. You’re trying to discover the interests and desires that make you who you are.
So if you want to pilot a spaceship into another galaxy for the first 20 years of your life, that’s okay. It likely will never happen but it may turn you onto an interest and then a career in science that’ll feed your soul and your pocketbook for the rest of your life.
It all starts with dreams. From there, the realistic possibilities of your life start to emerge. This makes taking the next step much easier.
2. Hit the Two Stages of Development
There are three stages of human development, and they’re all necessary if your life engineering mission is to be a success. They are:
Personal development: how you take care of yourself, what you’re putting out into the world, the relationships you make, the chances you take (or your willingness to take the right chances).
Intellectual development: what books do you read, what activities do you do to keep your mind growing and active?
Professional development: how will you use your training, your interests and your relationships to find, first, a major and then a career that is right for you?
Once you’ve worked on you, it’s time to move to the next phase. Staging!
3. Set the Right Goals
There are many goals you’ll need to set in life to get where you want to be. There are short-term goals, long-term goals, mid-term goals. And then there are realistic and unrealistic goals. You need them all.
The short-, mid-, and long-term goals connect you with varying levels of attainable achievement. The realistic goals allow you to move forward with each and every accomplishment that you achieve. The “unrealistic goals” allow you to dream big. And just because they’re “unrealistic,” that doesn’t mean you won’t end up achieving them or allowing them to shape your plans in a way that helps you accomplish far more than you thought possible.
4. Take Strategic Action
Strategic action is a different kind of action than the goals themselves. Goals are not actually action at all. They’re a destination. Action is what you do to work towards that destination.
Think of it in school terms. You want to make an A in your English class. But what will that entail? From that broad goal, you start looking at the different assignments, how they’re weighted, which areas you’ll need to do really well on as well as which areas are not as detrimental.
Once you know the assignments that will get you to an A, it’s time to focus the main share of your efforts on them. You can do this by developing a study guide for the exams, or a crackerjack topic for your term paper. Once you’ve done that, you schedule study groups or repetition or research time.
All these things are specific steps. And those steps take you closer and closer to your goal.
5. Examine Your Legacy
Legacy is important whether you’re just starting out or looking back on the life you’ve lived. For students, this can seem like it belongs so far into the future. But school is actually the right time to think about it.
What do you want people to say about you when you’re done? What mark would you have liked to leave personally and professionally? This act of looking ahead to what might be gives you the opportunity to make better decisions today and to dream the right kind of dreams.
Life Engineering Is About Planning and Action
Life engineering depends on cohesion between mind and body. You’ll want to incorporate both to the fullest extent of your abilities. Then, and only then, will you be ready to attain the life that’s in your head.
Now it’s your turn, readers. What are some of the life engineering tips that have helped you the most? Sound off in the comments section below!
Aric Mitchell's work appears regularly here at 4tests.com and across the web for sites, such as The Inquisitr and Life'd. A former high school teacher, his passion for education has only intensified since leaving the classroom. At 4tests, he hopes to continue passing along words of encouragement and study tips to ensure you leave school ready to face an ever-changing world.
