Would you like to know how to design your own destiny? By the end of today’s episode, you’ll know exactly how to design your own destiny and take your life to an entirely new level.
KEY POINTS
Do You Have a Vision! – If you don’t have a vision, you won’t know where you’re headed, you’ll drift through life.
Why Is Your Vision Important To You? – What is the deeply motivating reason that’s going to drive you towards fulfilling your destiny?
Focus on what’s important! – What are the outputs that matter most for the future you’re trying to create? Schedule your time, show up to appointments and single task. Focus on whatever it is that you intended at that moment.
Behaviour Follows Identity – Decide who it is that you want to be. Start acting how that person would.
Expect the Unexpected – By expecting the unexpected you’ll be stronger and a lot more capable of staying on the path to achieving and designing your own destiny.
Upgrade Your Network – Are you spending time with the people who help me achieve my destiny or are they holding you back?
Design Your Learning – Find out what it is you need to be learning to reach your goals, and learn it!
Visualize Your Dreams – Everyday for 5 minutes visualize your dreams and achieve your goals.
FREE DIGITAL BOOK
Grab a copy of my Amazon Best Selling Book The 3 Alarms. Click Here
TRANSCRIPT
Would you like to know how to design your own destiny? Well, by the end of today’s episode, you’ll know exactly how to design your own destiny and take your life to an entirely new level. Hi, my name is Eric Partaker and I’ve been recognized as one of the top entrepreneurs in the country and the CEO of the year. I’m also the author of two best-selling books, including The 3 Alarms. And most importantly for you, I’ve helped thousands of people realize their full potential in work and life.
The number one thing that you need to do when designing your own destiny is have a vision. If you don’t have a vision, you won’t know where you’re headed. And without knowing where you’re headed, you’ll drift throughout life. By having a vision, you’re having crystal clarity on what is the life that you want to create. What does it look like? What does it feel like? Who are the people that are going to be around you, where you’re living? What are you doing for a living? It’s super important to know where it is that you’re going or else you’d just get lost along the way. So, number one, you need to have a vision for where you want your life to go in order to design your own destiny.
Number two, you need to understand why. Why is that vision important to you? Without a compelling why you won’t be willing to stick with it and keep going when the times get tough. And by having a compelling why you also want to look for something that goes beyond just you? Let me give you an example. When we were building up Skype in its very early days, before we sold it to eBay, our tagline was, “The whole world can talk for free.” That was our why. And by having that why we came into work each and every day inspired, knowing that we are doing the world good. We were doing something beyond just ourselves. So again, number one, have a vision, know where it is that you’re going and what that looks like. And number two, know why do you want that? What’s the why behind it, the deeply motivating thing that’s going to drive you towards fulfilling that destiny of you for you.
Number three thing for designing your own destiny is focus. And you want to think about focus from a macro point of view and a micro point of view. So what do I mean by macro point of view, well, if you’re going to design your own destiny, then you need to be focusing on what matters most. What are the outputs that matter most for the destiny, for the future, that you’re trying to create. For example, if you want to design a destiny where you’re going to become a writer than the outputs that really matter for you are going to be writing books, or writing articles, or whatever it is that you’re seeking to write. So you need to make sure that you’re focused on those outputs, that’s at a macro level.
Then at a micro level, you need to be focused, seen in the course of your day. So what do I mean by that? Well, it’s very often we start our day and we get distracted. And if we’re constantly being distracted off our path, then we won’t stay on the path that leads to us fulfilling our destiny. So what do we need to do? We need to really get good at scheduling our time. Scheduling our time, showing up for those appointments with ourselves and then single tasking, whereby we just focus on whatever it is that we had intended to do in that moment, during that period of time.
So going back to the example of, if you’re writing a book, then you will have scheduled within your day, perhaps an appointment with yourself where you’re researching a particular topic that relates to the book. And so schedule that in your calendar. Show up for that appointment with yourself. And then while you’re there doing that research appointment, as an example, make sure that you’re just single tasking, you’re just focusing on that during that moment.
Number four, to design our own destiny, we need to decide who is it that we want to be because behavior follows identity. I’ll share a story with you very quickly. So not long ago, I bought my youngest son, a Captain America shield. And after that Captain America shield arrived at home, I gave it to him, and he immediately became Captain America. He started jumping around the room and wanting to run around with his shield and he was behaving like a superhero.
I didn’t need to, after giving him the shield, sit down with him and do a training session on how to behave or be like Captain America. He just knew how to do it. And all of us, you included, have that ability. We did it as children, where we would assume an identity and it would immediately shape our behavior. So my question to you is the following, who is the person that will have already achieved the destiny that you’re seeking? Think about who that person is and step into being that person right now. Not sometime in the future, not sometime later, but right now.
Number five secret to designing your own destiny is to expect the unexpected. I don’t know about you, but when I think about 365 days a year, the number of days that actually go perfectly to plan for me is maybe five. It’s a handful at the most. And most days don’t go exactly to plan. But if that’s the norm, then we’d be much better off knowing that, expecting it, embracing it, realizing that, that is just how life is rather than trying to expect or create anything else. Expect things to go slightly off, not exactly to plan. You want to stay directionally accurate in the pursuit of your destiny, but not get so angry when things don’t work out in the way that you had hoped or liked. And by expecting the unexpected and having that be a part of who you are, you’ll be a lot stronger, a lot more capable of staying on the path to achieving your own destiny, to designing your destiny.
Number six, to design your destiny, you need to upgrade your network. Let’s face it, there’s probably people in your life who maybe take away energy rather than give you energy that you dread being around, rather than that, you find very uplifting to be around. And why is that? Why don’t you take more control? Why don’t you look at your friendship network for example, and make some decisions about where you want to be spending your time? Who are the friends, for example, that when you spend time with them, they lead you to grow in some way, or they get you excited about your ambitions or basically help you in the fulfillment of that destiny of yours.
So take a very careful inventory of the people that you’re spending time with and ask yourself, who should I be spending more time with? Who should I be spending less time with? And there are so many ways in which you can increase the quality of your relationships. There are masterminds, for example, that you can join a mastermind is simply an assembly of a group of people who share a common purpose or idea, and who all agreed to meet, say once a month to share ideas and help each other with solving problems. You could be joining a group of like-minded people and seeking to get some cooperation and some collaboration, and maybe some support from that group.
Because once again, perhaps you are sharing some similarities in your destinies. Or going back to that friendship point, it could just simply be taken an inventory, once again of the people you’re spending your time with, versus the people you could be spending more time with and making sure that you’re making wise time investments with the right people. All of this needs to just relate back to the fulfillment of your destiny. So ask yourself, am I spending time with the people that will help me achieve my destiny, fulfill that destiny of mine or who are going to help, or who are likely to hold me back from achieving it, or in some way, prevent me from getting there?
Number seven, in the quest to design our destiny, we also need to be designing our learning. Think about it, you can’t achieve something bigger and greater than you most likely without learning new skills or acquiring new knowledge in some form. So sit down and ask yourself, what is it that I need to learn? And from whom, in order for me to fulfill this destiny of mine. And then get after it, whatever that is, if it’s a course that you should be taking, books that you should be reading, maybe it’s a part-time evening school that you could be attending, figure out what it is and take control of your learning. Make sure that your learning is there to support the destiny that you’re looking to fulfill that you’re looking to create. We’re all born with a clean slate, so it’s up to us to acquire the knowledge and the relationships and the things that we need in order to fulfill the destiny that we want.
And last but not least, I’m going to give you one final secret technique that you can use to help design and achieve your own destiny, which is the power of visualization. At the start of your day just take five minutes and all I want you to do is visualize your destiny. See it in your mind, feel it and ask yourself, who would you be when you achieved that destiny? Who would you be in that new envisaged future and feel what that looks like, feel the power of that within you, visualize it in your mind’s eye.
And I’d love to hear from you. So don’t forget to leave a comment and a rating as well. And if you’d like to get a copy of my new book, The Three Alarms, please head over to my website at ericpartaker.com. That’s E-R-I-C, Eric partaker.com, where you can pick up a free digital copy of my new best-selling book, The 3 Alarms.
