What Color Is Your Parachute?: Your Guide to a Lifetime of Meaningful Work and Career Success

by Richard Nelson Bolles

To make it more fun, take a large piece of white paper and then, with some colored pencils or pens, draw a picture of your ideal life: where you live, who’s with you, what you do, what your dwelling looks like, what your ideal vacation looks like, all of it. Don’t let reality get in the way. Pretend a magic wand has been waved over your life, and it gives you everything you think your ideal life would be. Now, of course you’re going to tell me you can’t draw. Okay, then make symbols for things, or create little doodads with labels—whatever works so that you can see all together on one page your vision of your ideal life, however primitively expressed. You could also make a vision board by cutting pictures and quotes out of magazines (or from the internet) and gluing them onto a piece of paper. The power of this exercise sometimes amazes me. Reason? By avoiding words and using pictures or symbols as much as possible, it bypasses your logical mind and focuses on your creative mind, whose job is to engineer change. Do fun things like this, as you’re exploring a new life for yourself.