Lesson #30: Plan your life in 7 steps 🐨
Dive into Harvard & BCG's strategic thinking to create the life you want :)
Tip: Craft your life strategy ✨
One of the best things you can do for your relationship with your future self is to be the best version of yourself that you can. One way to do that is to have a solid plan. BCG Partner Emeritus Rainer Strack used his expertise in corporate strategy to work with Harvard Business School and define what a life strategy looks like:
Corporate strategy (n): an integrated set of choices that positions an organization to win
Life strategy (n): an integrated set of choices that positions a person to live a great life
So go ahead and try to craft your life strategy using the steps below :)
Insight: Only 3% of us have a life strategy 😲
In the 60s, people believed that strategies belonged only in the military and in politics. We’ve come a long way since then, with Austrian-American consultant Peter Drucker’s Managing for Results (formerly Business Strategy) and Stanford professor-entrepreneurs Dave Evans and Bill Burnett’s Design Your Life.
Strack’s Strategize Your Life is an attempt to help apply strategy to life design, so our emotions and intuition have an analytical partner. It’s a 7-step process, adapted from corporate strategy:
The resources section below walks us through each step, which is especially helpful because a majority of us have never done anything like this:
79% of people don’t know what a great life means for them
83% people have no goals
88% people have no life vision
91% people don’t know their purpose
97% people have no semblance of a life strategy
Resource: The 7-step life strategy 😍
You can use this 1 page worksheet to design your life strategy, or even watch this video. If you’re looking for more details, you can use the 7 elements (and sample framework for each one) below:
Step #1: Great Life Definition
In 2011, American positive psychologist Martin Seligman developed the PERMA model of wellbeing. To understand your definition of a great life, rate each element below on a scale from 0 (not important) to 10 (very important). You can even add your own elements (e.g. autonomy, spirituality, vitality, etc):
Step #2: Life Purpose
There are many tools to help identify your purpose (including asking ChatGPT!), but here are 3 questions Harvard recommends:
What did you especially love doing when you were a child, before the world told you what you should or shouldn’t like or do? Describe a moment and how it made you feel.
Tell us about two of your most challenging life experiences. How have they shaped you?
What do you enjoy doing in your life now that helps you sing your song?
Step #3: Life Vision
Build a vision board! Start by looking at different photos (we recommend ~200) and choose 1 that describes personal success to you, and 1 that describes professional success. Then keep building around those photos, until you have an entire vision board. You can even use this free vision board builder from Canva to help :)
Step #4: Life Portfolio
Think about the 6 areas of life (e.g. relationships); and break them into units that matter to you (e.g. partner, family, friends). Then think about 3 things for each unit:
How important is this unit for my life? (0 = not important; 10 = very important)
How satisfied am I with this unit? (0 = not satisfied; 10 = very satisfied)
How much time do I dedicate to each unit from the 168 hours in my week?
You can then plot every unit on a 2x2 graph, like in the example below (the circle size shows how much time you spend on each unit):
Step #5: Life Benchmarks
Look around at the people you admire, and see how they spend their time. Or even look to existing research (samples below) and understand what makes peoples’ lives better and how you might apply that to your own life:
Step #6: Life Choice
Review Steps 1-5 above and list what changes you want to make (e.g. learn French)
Step #7: Life Action
Turn your choices from Step 6 into OKRs: Objectives (should be measurable) & Key Results. Develop a plan around how you’re going to meet each objective (e.g. meditate for 5 minutes / day using an app)
To recap: life strategies can help us understand and shape ourselves. Most of us don’t think about making our life strategies, but it’s a really simple 7 step process :)
We hope you learnt as much as we did this week!
Until next time,
With love and bear hugs,
Koa & Shriya 🥰✨