Decide Your Next Decade

Next week, Cal Newport and I are opening a new session of our popular course, Life of Focus. This three-month course has helped thousands of people struggling with distraction become more focused in their work, life and mind—so they can pay attention to what matters most. This week, we’re sharing lessons drawn from the course. If you missed the first two lessons, you can find them here and here.

What could you do in the next ten years if you knew you could focus on anything you chose?

Would you learn multiple languages? Get in incredible shape? Build a business? Become a star performer in your field, or invest wisely and retire early? What kind of life could you make for yourself?

We’re not used to thinking in terms of the next decade. For most of us, our horizon of concern is defined by our current problems: getting through the current project at work, graduating from our degree program, responding to daily stresses and frustrations.

The idea of proactively envisioning the next decade can seem overwhelming. But there’s a benefit to thinking longer. Ten years is long enough to accomplish many serious ambitions: truly mastering a skill, building a company from the ground up, reaching the apex of your career, or completely transforming your habits.

What Could You Do in a Decade?

I find it useful, as an exercise, to imagine what I might be able to do in the next ten years. The point of the exercise is not to meticulously or exhaustively plan out the years of your life—even dogged pursuits of a singular ambition usually require more flexibility than that. Instead, the point is to try to remind yourself of what you’re interested in and passionate about to find the “why” of focus in your life.

The next time you have fifteen minutes today, sit down with a blank piece of paper and write down what you would like to imagine your life could be like in ten years:

• What kind of work do you do?
• What are your relationships like with friends and family?
• What skills have you mastered?
• What are you doing for fun?

For the things you wrote down on your list that aren’t part of your life now, write down what you would need to focus on over the next ten years to make that a reality. If your future self is fluent in a language, what kind of practice would you need to do to get there? If you have a successful business, what types of projects would you have to complete to launch one?

Tomorrow and the Days After

Imagining how you’d like the next ten years of your life to be, and then asking yourself what a reasonable investment of energy would look like to accomplish those things, leads to an obvious follow-up question: how does the daily life needed to reach those ambitions compare to what you’re doing now?

There will always be a gap between our highest pursuits and our everyday reality. But being mindful of that gap is one of the best motivators to make change. It may be hard to hit a distant target, but as the motivational speaker Zig Ziglar remarked, “If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time.”

I’m curious to hear your goals for the next decade of your life, and what you think is the gap between your current actions and what you’d need to do to reach them. Share your thoughts in a comment on the original essay!

Next week, Cal Newport and I will reopen our course, Life of Focus, for a new session. If you want to become more focused in your life and work—paying more attention to what matters—our three-month program may be the perfect first step.