Plan Your Life.

(Source)

          Today was the first day of my new college and I must say it was amazing. I learned something that's important in our lives. Not the textbook knowledge but something that's applicable in real life. Dr. Radhakrishnan Pillai was the guest speaker. And what a fantastic orator he is! He talked about so many things. But, most of all I liked this one thing that he stressed at. He said that we always plan our life in short versions. Like 10 years of school. After that, we decide on 5 years on college. After that, we decide on 2 years of post-graduation and so on. Instead of planning our life in pieces, we should plan it for a long term. In fact, we should plan out our entire life! At our age of 21, he told us to plan our life until we're 80 years old. Now, that's going to take a lot of planning. But, I just thought about it and it surprised me how much keen I was on doing that. My academic life so far had been planned out in pieces. It was a smooth line without any obstacles. But, if I plan my future life, I'll be always prepared and optimistic. I won't need that mental push to decide something at the last moment. And I don't like surprises when it comes to serious life decisions. So that'll be also taken care of.

          Most people have a similar kind of life. School, college, graduation, post-graduation, job, marriage, abroad trip, kids, retirement. It's something that just happens like it's written on the manual we came with. But, shouldn't it be more specific? Shouldn't we know what we desire for, at what age and with whom? We can't keep our real passion to ourselves and say that we'll pursue it later. We need to define that big question mark of 'when'. We need to plan for that. We can't decide who we'll fall in love with, but we can decide an age to get married. We can't decide which field to take up at the age of 14, but we can decide a college. Even though we can't decide the details of it, we can decide the overall picture of what our lives would be at, say, 65. All we have to do is plan our entire future.

          Planning a future is not one day's job. It involves complex aspects. It involves other people. It involves more things than we possibly know about today. We need to think from all the dimensions. This planning can be about our career, home, family, personality and even our minds. What we think right now may not be what we wanted to do when we reach that age. But that needs to be thought of later because there needs to be some plan. We need to have some direction in life.

          If you have a dream of going on a world tour, then you need to plan for it years before. If you have a dream on playing in a show at Broadway, you need to plan for it. If you have a dream of winning the Olympics Gold, you need years of planning. If you have a dream of becoming the President, then you need to plan for a lifetime. If you want to change your dream into reality, then you need to plan for it. And then strive to achieve it for however it takes. Make a plan!

What do you think? How would you like to live your life?