What do you want your ideal life to be? It is perfectly okay to have not given this topic much thought before. There aren’t classes on finding your ideal lifestyle in school. Despite how different everyone is, society expects everyone to do the same thing.
Graduate college. Start working as a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or in a Fortune 500 company. Marry in your late twenties/early thirties, move to the suburbs, have 2.2 kids, retire after 45 years, and then spend your golden years bumming around Florida.
There is nothing wrong with that, but most people don’t want a cookie-cutter lifestyle.
Generalities of the Ideal Life
People have different preferences based on their generation and personality.
Even in a study of making employees more comfortable at work, different initiatives helped different people. Napping pods helped overworked parents decompress at work. Quiet time to focus on pet projects benefitted ambitious introverts, and encouraging company-wide picnics helped the extraverts.
Just as different personalities prefer different perks at work, different generations have distinct goals.
The baby boomers prefer collaboration, avoiding conflict, and working 50-60 hours work weeks.
Gen Z prefers working on individual tasks, working at companies that have an entrepreneurial spirit, and love working with diverse teams.
Why Your Ideal Life Matters
The above are generalities about personality type and age can serve as a guideline to the work you’d like to do or the day to day you’d like to have.
However, people have different goals in their lives. Everyone has distinct ambitions, values, needs, and unique backgrounds. There are no two people alike in the world. Similar yes, but identical, no.
There are guideposts along the way that can show you examples of what you’d like to do, and you can change it up to better fit your need ambitions.
Need guidance on your career? Check out this guide to help discover your dream job!
The Most Common Ideal Life Goals
Ranker is an open-source forum where people insert their answers of what they think ranks top to bottom. On a post asking about the most important life goals, with a total of 114,300 votes – below are the top 10 life goals people have.
- Being happy
- Enjoying life
- Being healthy
- Having financial freedom
- Pursuing ideas and passions
- Achieving self-knowledge
- Having close friendships
- Achieving intellectual growth
- Peace of mind
- Caring for others
Side Note: For the items hyperlinked in blue – we’ve covered those topics before at the blog. Clicking the link will send you to a helpful article about how to attain that goal for yourself!
The list surprised me. These aren’t what “society” tells us we should be wanting. Based on my Instagram “recommended” feed, the top goals should be having 6-pack abs, owning an exotic car, and growing this blog into a nine-figure business before the age of 28.
Based on my research, I related Ranker’s list a lot more.
The Harvard Study of Adult Development showed that in a study of over 80 years studying the lives of 456 different men – the men who had strong personal connections, were involved in their community, and learned to enjoy each day were happier and satisfied with their life.
Building Your Ideal Life
What do you want to do? I included the most common goals and the generalities to help get the creative juices flowing. While showing no goal is trivial, and share some of the most beneficial goals we can have.
Don’t get me wrong, having 6-pack abs would be awesome and an inspiring goal to have. It shows discipline and commitment to your health. The only reason I poked at that goal is that I didn’t want us going through this whole exercise thinking goals like that would lead to sustained happiness.
What is it that you Want out of Life?
It is a big question! Fortunately, your answer today does not have to be set in stone. Our goals change as we grow older, have different life experiences and find out more about ourselves. However, it does help to set down some guiding goals that can help move life in the direction that you want to be going. Moving towards your ideal lifestyle more each day.
Put yourself ahead in three years. What are you doing, what are you like, and how is your every day to day life like?
Keep in Mind, Life has its own Agenda
Knowing your goals is tremendous, and they can guide you along your way. Remember to stay flexible along the path too. You never know what life will throw your way. What if one of your points is to be married by 30, but your ideal spouse comes along at 31? You don’t want to pigeonhole your life and make a major life decision to hit some self-imposed deadline.
I am guilty of putting too much pressure on myself to get everything done as well. Instead of setting certain timelines with these goals, let them be your guideposts. For example, instead of “be married by 30” set, “be married to someone who makes me feel special, supports me, and has similar values to what I want from life.” That guides you where you want to go while being open to flexible schedules.
Questions to Build Your Ideal Life
To help align your thinking, it helps to break-out each facet of life into their respective categories. Then fill in the blanks to see the whole picture together.
Professional Career
What do you want to be in your career? Do you want to be a CEO, entrepreneur, influencer, subject matter expert, or anything else?
Is there an industry you’ve always been interested in working for or different skills that you want to be building?
Relationships
What does your family life look like? Do you want a life partner? How many kids do you want? None, a big family or something in between?
How about your extended circle? Do you have a thriving social scene with close friends and a large professional network?
Living Situation
Where do you live? A mansion in rural Italy, or a beach house on long island? Something else? Dream your ideal living location.
Day to Day Life
Are you up at 5 AM hitting the gym before tackling a court case at 9 AM, or do you wake up at 9 AM to have a leisurely breakfast before going to write on your sunlit balcony? Or, do you not even work at all? Instead of traveling the world, volunteering, or reading books in your comfy home?
Dream big – what is it that you do most days in your ideal life?
Developed Skills
What skills have you developed? Think hard skills like coding, painting, or website building. Along with soft skills like selling, presenting, and getting along with different people.
What skills do you have in your arsenal as you approach every day?
Personality
How are you like each day? To yourself, and others. What personality traits do you show? How do you talk to yourself, and how do you interact with those in your life?
Values
What values do you live out each day? Do you have the freedom of choice where you can spend each day doing what you want or do you value hard-work being up at 5 AM to 11 PM working on your work?
There are no wrong answers. You are dreaming of your ideal lifestyle. Your life can even be a mix of many values. It helps to be thinking of what you value most in life to start setting yourself up to live those values.
Material Possessions
What do you own? What car do you drive, how is your house decorated, which kinds of gifts do you give, what is your wardrobe, and what surrounds you? Is it the latest in everything or on the complete opposite end – a minimalist lifestyle? What best suits you and your ideal life?
Hobbies
How are your hobbies progressing? What do you dedicate your free time to learning and doing? Making times for hobbies is a perfect spot to put your six-pack ab goal or painting the next best art exhibit.
Giving back
How do you give back to your community?
Live your Ideal Life a Little Each Day
That was a lot of introspection and it is okay to feel a little exhausted after running through those questions. You did analyze your entire ideal life and were probably comparing it to your current life along the way. You might be dissatisfied with how different the two are.
Do not worry, studies show that most people feel a gap between their real life and ideal life. The trick is to slowly make that gap smaller and smaller each day.
Think of how you can live your life each day. If your goal is to be happy, work on being happier each day. There is never a 180 degrees turn around where all of a sudden everything is “fixed”. However, by steadily improving each day, you can become a better version of yourself.
For more tangible goals like breaking into your dream industry – tap your network to see who is working a job similar to the one you want (or knows someone who is). Ask them to coffee or a call for twenty minutes to pick their brain. You can do little things to start lining it up so you can get to where you want to be going.
Get creative. Look at the list you ran through. There is a lot. Which three goals are your biggest priorities? Add them to your daily to-do list for the week. What is one thing you can do for each of them to start working on the goals to make your ideal life? Even for just ten minutes a day for each of them.
It will feel weird at first, but recognize this is the way to start building your way to that your ideal life! Plus, the compound effect will steadily take over and push you to your dream life!
Main Take-Aways
- People are similar, but everyone has different life goals. Having different goals means everyone has a different ideal life they would like to be living.
- Finding your ideal life takes some introspection and asking yourself the hard questions of what matters to you.
- Once you know where you want to go, prioritize your objectives and work on the top 3 each day, even just for ten minutes.
Action Items
Complete the reflection exercise. Which goals are your top 3 objectives? How can you work on them each day for the next week? How do you feel after working on your goals? Use those feelings to continue to push your comfort zone and live the life you want!
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