ABOUT 35 years ago, the late Stephen Covey identified and elaborated upon four specific human endowments, which I consider to be God-given gifts to human beings. Anthropologists point out that those specific endowments set apart our species, Homo sapiens, from the rest of Earth's animal kingdom.
In Covey's groundbreaking masterpiece, his bestselling book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, he wrote:
"Every human has four endowments — self-awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom... The power to choose, to respond, to change."
So, today I'll zero in on the role one of those endowments, creative imagination, can play in improving our personal circumstances.
For most of us, life is tough. Furthermore, with the passage of time, despite the proliferation of creature comforts like microwave ovens, hot water heaters, flatscreen TVs, streaming services, mobile phones with more processing power than the big computers that sent 12 American male Apollo astronauts to walk on the moon in the late 1960s to early 1970s, buses, trains, bikes, cars, and an Earth-straddling network of interconnected commercial airlines, we often feel as though life gets steadily tougher. This perception is borne out by the stunning rise in cases of mental illness worldwide.
So, what might make life better for us?
FINANCIAL PLANNING
At the risk of sounding crass, I would say more money. I acknowledge that accumulating more material wealth is not a perfect elixir for our modern woes of geriatric diseases, mental disequilibrium, angst, pollution, and inflation, but it certainly helps partially shield our families from some of those negatives.
Here's a definition I use every day in my professional work:
"Financial planning is the process of meeting your life goals through the proper management of your finances."
Do reread that line to better digest the vital definition of financial planning.
In setting our life goals, it would be wise for us to use our incredible human endowment of creative imagination to envisage the (much) better life we might attain in five, 10, 15 or 20 years.
When I work on this vital facet of future-planning with my consulting clients, I often also teach them an exercise I learned from author and big-name professional speaker Brian Tracy.
THE IDEAL TOMORROW
Tracy advises each of us to imagine the ideal "tomorrow" that we want to experience in every dimension of life by dreaming big dreams, and to then engage in what he describes as "back from the future thinking".
This process of dreaming big dreams in the various life dimensions of our family, career, health, fitness, finances, and education is called IDEALISATION. We harness our potent human endowment of creative imagination to imagine the ideal life we would love to have in the years ahead — perhaps a decade from now by late 2034 or early 2035.
Of course, none of us knows what the future holds. But we do have a choice between (a) floating along like driftwood, and (b) charting a course to a desired destination. I recommend the latter.
Our first step in proactively creating the better future we desire — because none of us dreams of an inferior or even stagnant tomorrow — is to IMAGINE what our brighter days ahead might look like.
Our second step is to WRITE DOWN — in as much detail as possible on the pages of a dedicated notebook, which you might label "My Life Journal" — the specific goals you'd like to achieve, say, a decade from today.
Then, our third crucial step, heeding Tracy's advice, is to take time to "THINK BACKWARD" from 10 years ahead back to today, and to meticulously outline the steps you need to take today, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, two years from now, five years from now, and so on.
For each personal dimension, say the career, spiritual, physical, and financial facets of your life, imagine and then identify the tangible steps you need to take to cause your ideal life to materialise in a decade.
ACHIEVING SUB-GOALS
For instance, let's assume your current total income is RM8,000 a month, and all of it, say, at the end of 2024, is derived solely from active earnings through arduous activity at your job or directly from your personally run small business, with nothing flowing to you in the form of passive income because you don't (yet) have a yield-generating SIP, or savings-and-investment portfolio.
Next, let's further assume your (mega) goal for the start of 2035 is to almost quadruple your current total earnings to RM30,000 a month. As illustrative guidance, let's say part one of your big goal is to have RM15,000 a month flow from active earnings, while part two for the other RM15,000 in new monthly income is to create, through proactive steps, specific passive income streams from an aggressively built-up SIP that generates interest from bank deposits, dividends from EPF and stocks, distributions from unit trust funds, and rental from investment real estate.
For now, mull on how you might achieve both sizeable sub-goals. Next week, we will explore practical strategies to do both — increase your active income and your eventually more important passive income.
© 2024 Rajen Devadason
Rajen Devadason, CFP, is a securities commission-licensed Financial Planner, professional speaker and author. Read his free articles at www.FreeCoolArticles.com; he may be connected with on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/rajendevadason, or via rajen@RajenDevadason.com. You may also follow him on Twitter @Rajen Devadason and on YouTube (Rajen Devadason).