The blog

A cou­ple of weeks ago I gave a talk at KY-Akademien, a col­lege for advanced voca­tion­al edu­ca­tion and train­ing here in Gothen­burg, Swe­den. The audi­ence was the stu­dents at the two-year pro­gramme for Adver­tis­ing and Mar­ket­ing and my top­ic was ​“Vision and goals (and how it real­ly works in every­day life),” on how to do to define a long-term vision for your­self or your busi­ness and break it down into short­er, more detailed mile­stones (and in par­tic­u­lar on the impor­tance thereof).

At the end of the half day sem­i­nar, each of the stu­dents were asked to illus­trate his or her vision, i.e. the desired future sit­u­a­tion they want to expe­ri­ence in approx­i­mate­ly 5 years, and present it the fol­low­ing day.

In the pre­sen­ta­tions the next day we got to see incred­i­bly intri­cate and inspi­ra­tional visu­al­iza­tions of the desired future. Some­one showed a short film in which he vis­it­ed him­self in five years, some­one was read­ing a text in lit­er­ary style, which described a typ­i­cal day in 2015, some­one had writ­ten a let­ter to him­self from his future, five years old­er self. We were shown mood boards, ani­ma­tions, sketch­es, water­col­ors, pho­tographs and much more.

I would like to high­light what one of the stu­dents had done. I think it was a mul­ti­fac­eted and ele­gant solu­tion to the chal­lenge of mak­ing it clear to one­self that you move for­ward, in the right direction.

In addi­tion to illus­trat­ing her vision, she had iden­ti­fied about 30 goals, big and small things that she thought that she would need to do or achieve in order to make the vision come true.

She had writ­ten each of these goals on a match­stick (about 30 in total). In the box that she kept them in, a label said, ​“Goals”.

When she achieves one of these goals, she picks up the right match, lights it and watch­es it burn up. ​“Now it’s done!”.

Here is a pic­ture of the match­box and the matchsticks.

An extra dimen­sion is that she talked about her­self as being a col­lec­tor who eas­i­ly accu­mu­lates a lot of stuff and has a some­what hard time to throw stuff away. The good thing is that when she will have met all objec­tives, there is no sym­bol­ic sticks left, but every­thing is burned and gone.

Only the most impor­tant thing is left — life as she wants it.