It’s the one thing every one of us has in equal amounts. And yet, so many people will blame their failure to accomplish more on a lack of time. Curiously, for the person with no goals or ill-defined goals, no amount of time is enough. If you leave your life to chance, you know what’s going to happen. Your entire day, day after day, will be taken up taking care of other people’s concerns.

Instead of making great strides or even inching towards what you want for yourself, you find yourself forever focusing all of your time and energy on someone else’s agenda.

Be “someone” more specific Lily Tomlin says, “All my life I wanted to be someone, now I see I should have been more specific.” What are you here to accomplish? Until you can add details to your vision for your life, you are like just about everyone else who reacts to what life brings them rather that influencing what happens to them.

Knowing exactly what you want is the only thing that will move you towards that destination, barring dumb luck, of course, and who wants to rely on that?

Remember the story of Alice in Wonderland? Alice arrives at the fork in the road and asks the Cheshire cat which road she should take. The cat replies that that all depends on where she’d like to end up. Alice replies that she doesn’t really know. The clever cat wisely responds that if she doesn’t know where she’s going, it really doesn’t matter how she gets there.

So, you see, if you don’t have a plan for yourself and know how you’re going to invest your mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual energy, then it doesn’t really matter what you do during the day. You are just responding to someone else’s agenda for you.

And trust me, if you don’t have a plan for yourself, someone else does. There are countless companies out there who want to use your brain and brawn to further their own purposes.

So ask yourself, do you have a plan that you designed for yourself, or are you following someone else’s plan for your life?

©2006 Crystal Jonas