Jim Somchai Managing Director of JimSomchai Company. He devotes his time in studying success and has been interested in the works of many personal development leaders. He resides in Thailand. You can find more of his information on visualizing success and much more on his website Visualization Meditation.
When you think about future, do you see where you are going to be? Are you certain that you will have what you want in a certain period of time? Do you have goals? Is your life the way you want it to be?
When you think about future, do you see where you are going to be? Are you certain that you will have what you want in a certain period of time? Do you have goals? Is your life the way you want it to be? If you go back to where you were three or five years ago, would you be happy to see the status you are having right now? Do you believe that if you lead your life like this, you will wind up not much different from where you are now? Will you happy? These many questions relates to what we call “time perspective”.
Do you know that successful people have longer time perspective than the ones who are not so successful? Successful people think of the impact of the actions to their lives in three or five years late. They ask themselves if the situation helps or have some impact to their lives long term. On the contrary, unsuccessful people think about their short term gratification. They hardly have plan for future and their care less on their time planning if they have one. We can easily notice if we are a good time planner by seeing if we are often impulse buyers. If we buy things without plan or just by them because we accidentally bump into it. There is a tendency that we are the short time perspective people. We need to hurriedly correct that.Why does the long term time perspective matter? Because it relates to how we plan our lives for the good future not only just for being happy for a short while and then bear the negative consequences. Whether a person is successful is measured long term. Some even says that everything in life is measured by what you have on the last day of your life. I think it is logical and well spoken.For some investment like buying a house, we understand that people need to prepare well in advance before we go into it. We know that we need to prepare financially since the almost all of the house payment is for long term. We need to know the location and understand how we and our families can commute within the area. We need to know how the utilities are provided. Will there be any new construction nearby? How about the pollution problem and people nearby? We need to think a lot about these before we buy a house right? Why is that? Because buying a house is an expensive process for most people and it has big impact to the lives of us.
Planning a life is like buying a house. Unfortunately, most people take their lives for grant and ignore the process. They are not so careful on leading their lives and a lot of them end up in trouble in the latter years of their lives. Tragically, a lot realize this when it is too late for them to do anything. Don’t let this happen to you.
Start to honor your time perspective. See things in the longer term view. Ask yourself what will happen to you five years from now if you keep doing what you are doing. Will you be better off or worse off? Once you create a habit of asking this question, you will amazingly improve your time utilization which in the end will help you in the future.
Although there are a lot of concepts teaching that you need to focus and do things for the moment of now, there is the other angle of the time usage for the future results. This article talks about long into long term perspective and how to use your time effectively.