“There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their lives is bound in shallows and miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat; and we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.”
William Shakespeare
The message from this quote is that, opportunities that are presented to us, must never be wasted or else, we will end up in regrets (shallows, miseries and loss of our ventures, as is found in the quote)
A New Year (year 2024) is here and year 2023 is already gone. If we must make reasonable progress and achieve noteworthy accomplishments in this year 2024, then we must commit to doing these three things::
1. Reflect on year 2023
It was Socrates who said “An unexamined life is not worth living.”
He meant that the self-examination and reflection is what enables us to live relevant lives.
In order to carry out reflection over your life you should ask yourself such questions as:
- What did you achieve in year 2023?
- What were the things you wanted doing that you couldn’t do in that year and what stopped you from achieving those goals? How are you going to overcome those obstacles to achieve those goals in this year?
- What did you do wrongly or poorly last year and what’s your plan to improve in those areas this year 2024?,
- Who are the friends that helped you the most last year, and who were the ones that didn’t contribute to your life at all? What’s your plan to draw yourself closer to these very helpful friends and away from those non-contributing, non-adding, time wasting and parasitic-fake friends?
- Whose advice helped you achieve the most this year and whose advice was bad advice? What’s your plan to draw yourself closer to your good advisers and away from your bad advisers?
And so on and so forth (use your discretion, there is no perfect formula for doing all that)
Taking your time to make this kind of reflection, prepares your mind and makes it a fertile ground for the next stage (stage 2):
2. Set goals for this year.
This is the next thing you ought to do to make the most of this year.
Goal setting is a major requirements for accomplishing record breaking achievements. The question here is what are the things you will want to achieve in this year 2024.
Set goals for the following areas:
- Health and wellness.
- Career/Profession
- Family/relationships
- finances.
- passion/hobbies and interests
- life’s Work/Purpose
Write down all the goals in the aforementioned areas. Also ensure you include the balance of the goals or things you couldn’t achieve in year 2023, that you identified during your reflection time (in step 1)
3. Make a plan for achieving your goals this year.
It is said that, ” When you fail to plan you plan to fail.”
Setting goals is not enough, you must plan how to achieve your goals.
A goal without a plan is only a wish! Remember the saying; “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride”
So develop a strategy to help you realize your goals.
The pattern for developing the plan is:
- I will do this and that to achieve this and that. It’s as simple as that.
- Use your discretion too, there is no perfect way to do it. It’s work of common sense.
Note that “The great life is never a product of laziness, indifference or fate, it is the handiwork of great levels of sacrifice.”
Conclusion
A great opportunity for increasing our status and fortune is here. We must reflect on last year and put our house in order (that is to bridge our weaknesses), set goals for this new year 2024 and plan how to achieve our goals or else we will repeat the mistakes of last year as well as re-experience the challenges of last year 2023 even in this new year 2024.
