What are you going to do?

Where are you going to college?

What kind of job are you going to have?

What are you going to do with your life?

If you’ve ever gotten sick of listening to people ask you these questions. You’re totally normal. Don’t worry, everyone ends up with these type of questions at some point in their life.

The good news is that there is a good way to answer. The answer isn’t in full, you won’t have a complete answer until you are done with your life. And that is good.

There is a very simple Three step Process that answers a lot of these questions. That process is simple, but it is not necessarily easy.

The simple process is this:

Define —> Learn —> Do 

In a short summary, the way it works goes like this. Define what you want, whether that is lifestyle, income, legacy, relationships, contributions, etc. Learn how to get that from someone who has that type of result in life. And Finally, go and do what they tell you to do.

Like I said, this process is simple but not easy. There are hundreds of ways to mess this process up. Only three steps! And yet it is contrary to what so many people tell you or ask you. Go check out those four questions that we started out with and notice that not one of them start with the first step in the process! If you don’t start with Defining what or where you are headed, how will you know who to learn from or what to do?

I think it is ridiculous how much pressure is put on young people to make decisions about the third step in the process with little to no thought put to the first two steps!

So what now? How can we remedy this? Why would I tell you about the Define —> Learn —> Do process and leave you hanging?

One tool that I have recently come across is a great book called PAiLS by Chris Brady. I read this book about a week ago, it was so chock full of truth that I read through it in only a couple days.

PAiLS is an acronym for P.otential & A.ctualization i.nto L.egacy & S.pillage. I won’t spoil the book for you, but each of us has potential to be great in our own way that we implement through actualization into our enduring legacy (with some missed opportunities becoming spillage). This can be easily visualized as a Potential pail pouring out into a Legacy Pail.

“Becoming all you can be will require all that you are.” -Chris Brady

So as we consider Defining our life, a concept from PAiLS is valuable. The idea from Brady that life is lived out in layers! This youtube video by Chris Brady (Click Here) goes into Layer idea for about 10 minutes and is a good overview of the concept.

This can be a great introduction for one to understand that simply answering the question of “Are you going to _____ college?” isn’t enough planning for their future. There needs to be two previous steps, first to understand if College is going to provide a pathway to the life you wants and second to see if those that you’ll learn from have the results that they are teaching about. And that is only one of the questions…. to find out what you’ll do, you have some other things to think about first.

“Our greatest fear should not be that we won’t succeed, but rather that we will succeed at something that doesn’t matter.”   – D.L. Moody.

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