Dare to Design and Live an Excellent Year

“The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.”—Abraham Lincoln

An awesome life comprises of many good years, and to live an excellent year, we must start with the decision to live right in just one day and then replicate the success of that one day throughout the year. 

Meanwhile, to fulfill this life-enhancing idea, we must think and reflect about what we truly want and where we are going. In other words, we need absolute clarity on what matters most at this point in our lives. Once we gain that clarity, then the next thing is to be decisive about making the necessary changes in alignment with our purpose.

This is important because if we neglect to proactively craft a better year, we shall by default live a year of mediocrity, or worse, a year of regress and degeneration. As the saying goes, “failing to plan is tantamount to planning to fail.” When we don’t decide and design how to live our days; our years will hardly take us to where we really want to go.

Each day that we procrastinate to live by a meaningful design; we are taking some layers off the sweet fruits of the promising future that we all desire. In essence, we need to understand that our future is not made by what we shall do tomorrow; our future is made by what we decide to do today. 

No matter how lofty our intentions are; if we neglect to design a healthy lifestyle, we won’t magically end up having an ultra-healthy body. If we neglect to schedule for a regular study, we can’t magically end up as the best student of the year. And if we neglect to plan for a successful venture; we can’t magically end up with super-profitable business in our industry. 

My core message here is this: to have an awesome year, we must design it first and then commit to living by the blueprint on day-to-day basis. As Debbie Ford, the author of ‘The Dark Side of the Light Chasers,’ once said, "You can’t just say that you’re committed to creating the best year of your life and expect it to stick. You have to make a conscious effort to allow this commitment to become part of your internal belief system."

Read on to learn the practical way of doing just that.

Design an Awesome Day First

To start with, know that living an awesome year is not about doing 300 things really well, but it is about doing very few, essential things really well, 300 times. As Gary Keller, the author of ‘The One Thing’ says: “You need to be doing fewer things for more effect instead of doing more things with side effects.” This idea is the basis of our design for an excellent year—starting with the first day. 

In line with your purpose, decide your big three goals for the next 12 months. After that, break down these goals into doable daily actions. I wrote ‘doable’ to make sure that your daily actions are easy enough to do and repeat for 300+ days.

Then create a space for each action in your daily routine. Now, you must act according to your plan. This is perhaps the most important of all: do your primary duty, every single day, without fail. 

This foundational factor is the yardstick for you to know whether your day is awesomely productive or not. And, to maintain the right course, live by this powerful daily mantra: ‘until my most valuable priorities are done, everything else is a distraction.’

Remember, you have decided earlier in advance where you want to end up at the end of the year. To achieve that, you only need to replicate your purpose-driven day, every day, for the rest of the year. If you do this, not only will your vision be guaranteed to happen; it will also make your journey a little less stressful. 

And the good habits that you build as a result will make the subsequent years far more promising.