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Fulfillment is when your purpose and core values are in full alignment with each other. Naturally, core values and purpose are two of the first things Joe covered, in episodes 3 and 4. You need to spend the time figuring those two things out.   When you take the two together and ask yourself, ‘What do I believe? Why was I born?’ the next logical question is ‘Who or what do I want to be?’ That is vision, and that’s the topic for today’s episode.   It’s really important that you know what your core values and purpose are when working on your vision. If you’re filtering your vision through your core values and your purpose, you’re much more likely to come up with a vision that will bring you fulfillment.   If you’re just coming up with a vision without thinking those other things through, you might be running 100 miles an hour in the complete wrong direction. So if you haven’t yet, go back and listen to episode 3 about core values and episode 4 on purpose before you listen to this one.   Doing the hard work of figuring out your core values and purpose, allows you to create a much more vibrant, satisfying and fulfilling vision.     Creating the vision for your life and business Joe subscribes to the idea you need a vision that’s so clear and detailed you can close your eyes and picture what it looks like.   What are your dreams? What are your highest aspirations?   Don’t think small here. There are people who are not putting in the work to do this, but you don’t need to be around those people when you’re coming up with your vision because a lot of them get satisfaction from tearing other people’s dreams down. But don’t worry: if your vision doesn’t make a few haters laugh, then your vision isn’t big enough or bold enough.     How do you go about creating your vision for yourself? Joe has seven steps for how to do this. If fulfillment was easy, everybody would be contented, satisfied and fulfilled. But it’s not easy. It takes the best you’ve got to go through the steps to figure it out.  It’s worth the effort. If you follow this plan, you can create an incredible vibrant vision for yourself.     Step 1: Quiet time Quiet time is one of the most valuable tools that we have. Joe is always amazed how many successful people who have risen to a certain level spend all their time in noise and distraction. They don’t have time to stop and think, and they have that brain spin going on all the time where problems are going through their heads and they can’t think about anything else.   Sound familiar?   You can gut it out and play defense, using force of will and extra hours to push your way through it and still be successful. But when you stop and slow down, you get the chance to study yourself and your situation, think about how you’re going to grow personally and in your business. When you stop and do those things, you get a chance to play offense.   Joe’s business is in real estate, and from the moment he walks in the door as the Managing Broker of a company, he has problems to solve, people who need help and questions to answer. If he didn’t spend time in the morning working ON the business so that he could go into the day with a plan to be on offense, to push the big rocks forward, he would spend the entire day in reaction mode. He would put all his time and energy on defense, responding to what’s on fire instead of what’s important.   Quiet time gives you a chance to set your own agenda for your own success. It gives you an opportunity to work ON your business or ON your life and be on offense even when everything’s going crazy all around you. Quiet time is hugely important in all of the things that you do in your life.   Step 2: Think about what you want your life and business to look like In order to create to your vision, some of the things you need to be thinking about during that quiet time are: What do you want to accomplish? What are your greatest goals in life? What do you want your life to stand for when it’s all over? When you look back, what do you want people to say about you? Who you were, what you did, what you accomplished, and the people whose lives you touched? Who do you want to serve with your life? Yourself, others, the betterment of the world, a group of people? How do you want to serve those people? How do you apply your skills, talents and purpose towards serving people? What do you want your day to look like? What problems do you want to solve? What people do you want working for you and with you?   These are important questions because when you get to the end of your life, if you spent your whole life serving yourself, you’re going to feel pretty empty inside. We’re built to work with other people and to help other people. Working that into your vision—how you help other people and how you serve them—will make that a much more fulfilling process than not thinking about it and just seeing whatever comes your way.   One way to really get a feel for who you are and what you believe is to look at what Dan Sullivan calls the four freedoms. These are the areas where we’re all seeking freedom in our lives: time, money, relationships and purpose.   Ask yourself: if I had unlimited time and I could do anything in the world I wanted to, what would that be? If you’re feeling particularly overwhelmed with the noise and distraction of life, your first reaction might be that you just want to play golf all day or go on vacation. But when you think it through and really drill down, you’ll find that if you had unlimited time you’d be spending it in your purpose, doing something you believe God created you to do.   What about if you had freedom of money, unlimited resources? What would you do with them?   Joe’s wife, one of the most generous people he knows, would be giving a lot of it away, helping people with it. Is that something you’d do? Or perhaps, like Peter Diamandis, you would be pursuing some big idea, like Space X, the passenger service into space.   What’s the big idea that you would go after if you had unlimited resources?   Then there’s freedom of relationships. If you were free to associate with anybody, who would those people be? Where would those relationships go? This is not just about your relationship with a spouse or family, but also about business relationships. What type of people would you want to surround yourself with? Freedom of relationship is choosing who you want to associate with and who you don’t.   Freedom of purpose is created by freedom of time, money and relationships. It opens the door to live out your purpose and then your vision comes into play.   If you look at all those things and spend your quiet time working on them, you’ll discover what that vision needs to look like.     Step 3: Get everything down on paper in great detail Some people are not writers, they don’t think this way, but you need to break your vision down into smaller chunks and work on it a little bit at a time.   In your vision of what you want your life to be, what does your typical morning look like? Write down in detail your typical morning, typical afternoon, evening, relationships, vacation time and work time. Don’t just think in terms of what you see, think of what you hear, smell, and touch. Use all your senses to make it come alive. Break it down in all the different ways you can think of, get it all out on paper. Put it aside for a little while, then come back to it, add more detail. It’s not something you do in an afternoon.   Over the course of months and even a year or two, you create a vivid vision of what you want your life to be. Write it in the present tense as if it’s already happened because if you’re reviewing it on a regular basis, you need to make sure that it’s real to you as you’re doing it. This is the thing that’s going to drive you. When you create your goals to achieve this, believing you’re on your way to this vision is what’s going to push you and drive you when you don’t feel like doing things.     Step 4: Go to your core values and filter the vision through them Is your vision consistent with what you believe and what your core values look like? Another term for vision is 'core values realization' because you’re actually living out your core values. Are you able to achieve this vision by living them, or are there values you don’t have listed you need to add?   Some people, early on in their lives, are not hard workers. They’re not grinders, they don’t have discipline. It’s something they have to learn how to do. If you have a fantastic vivid vision of what you want your life to be, it can give you the drive you need and provide the motivation that gets you to go after it when you don’t feel like it. That drive and work ethic is something you can develop even though it’s difficult. That’s where your core values come into play.   If it’s not, you need to adjust your core values or your vision. Are you living out something in your vision that is in opposition to your core values? Or is there something missing from your core values, like hard work, that is a key component of achieving the vision? You need to add it and make sure you are actively trying to live it out so you can achieve the vision you’re going after. That’s why you need to do the core values first, before the vision, because you use them to help shape that vision.     Step 5: Your ‘why’ or purpose Now that you have your detailed vision, why do you want it? How is your purpose going to get you to that?   In the previous episode Joe talked about the utilitarian vs. artistic approach to purpose. The utilitarian approach is when you’re living out your purpose every day, and your vocation is your purpose. The artistic approach is when you’re working hard so you can create the time, space and resources to do your purpose separately from your work. Which one are you doing and how does that match your vision?   If your vision does not give you the ability to live out your purpose, it’s going to be unfulfilling when you get to it. You really need to think about that WHY. Why do you want this vision? Why are you going after this? What is the reason that you’re doing this?   All of that comes together to help you come up with those reasons why you’re going to push when you’re exhausted. You know your vision is vivid enough when, if someone where to wake you up out of a dead sleep at 3am and said ‘it’s time to do something that’s going to move you closer to your vision,’ you would jump up and say ‘yeah, let’s go do that right now.’ Then you know your vision is driving you. If you would rather go back to sleep, your vision still needs work!     Step 6: Turn your vision from a dream into a goal Create an action plan for yourself to start moving forward. Start at the end and work your way backward, thinking about what you would need to do to get to that end goal from where you are right now.   They say the first million dollars is the hardest to make. Once you have resources like that, opportunities become a lot easier to come across and act on, but when you’re struggling trying to get to it and don’t have the resources, you have to do everything yourself. If you’re at a point where there are lots of things you need to do yourself, you need to have the steps in place to work backwards from there. You eat an elephant one bite at a time. There’s a whole set of steps to get you to your goal, but you have to take the time to think about what those steps are. Figure out how to each day take a step towards making that vision a reality. That’s what the action plan needs to be. Sometimes when you create the action plan, you see there’s a big gap you don’t know how to get past. Work towards getting to the edge of the gap. When you get to the edge, you figure out at that point how to get over it. Or you enlist other people to help. You have to believe that as you’re working towards it, the doors are going to open to help you when the time is right for that next step.   The action plan is hugely important and you need to be relentless in moving forward on it every day to make your vision more and more of a reality.     Step 7: Periodically, adjust the vision Often, when you’re pursuing something, detours happen and take you in a totally new direction. In life, the best-laid plans go awry and you end up going in a new direction.   Back in the recession, Joe had a plan. But things didn’t go to plan and he ended up going in a much better direction instead. Things change as we have new experiences, challenges and disappointments. They strip things from us and give us new goals in life. That’s where you have to go back to your vision and ask if it’s still in line with what that will bring you fulfillment. Have you discovered a new offshoot of your purpose that takes you in a different direction?   Go back to podcast number 2 if you haven’t heard Joe’s story about the recession. In it, you’ll hear how his goals changed, and the materialism of his 20s was stripped out of him. Joe realized doing big things that change the world and having an impact on other people is more important than material things. He had to rethink his vision because his core values changed and he gained a new understanding of his purpose.   Periodically looking at that vision and adjusting it will help you make sure it remains in line with your core values and purpose. It also ensures your vision becomes that fulfilling part of your life. Take the time if you haven’t already to sit down and figure out your core values and purpose. Then take those two things together and come up with your vision.   So many people are aimless and rudderless, and their comfort zone shrinks to the size of the chair they sit in watching in TV. Take the time to build this foundation because it’s going to give you a path to a much richer and more fulfilling future.   If you’ve been enjoying this podcast and it has been helpful, head on over to iTunes and give it a rating and a review. Then share it with someone you think it could help. Joe would love to hear from you at joe@studentoflifepodcast.com.