I wrote my personal manifesto in under 10 minutes. Here’s how I did it. Ready, set, go.
When you write your personal manifesto there are three core questions you can answer:
One of the easiest ways to write a personal manifesto is to describe your ideal day. It answers the question ‘How do I want to live?’
And all you need to do is answer these THREE questions.
Plus, I’ll share a big tip that will help you answer these questions quickly AND have more ideal days.
Most people think this is the most important question. But I don’t think it is.
Years ago, I studied in Lincoln, Nebraska. It was the best time of my life.
While Lincoln is a fabulous place, it wasn’t about the location. There are plenty of sexier places than Lincoln Nebraska. But you can be lonely in Paris or sad in San Fransisco.
For me, I prefer being around water and the beach.
But ultimately your location is not critical unless it lines up with your answer to question #3
I loved my time in Lincoln because of two crucial things.
The first thing was that I was studying and learning. I was doing a Masters degree in Architecture.
Learning and creating is my primary activity, and my ideal is to be free to do this every day.
Right now, I love creating these videos. And when I’m working on them I’m living my Ideal Day.
What is your primary activity? Once you define this, you can build your day around it.
This third question is the most important one of all.
The second big reason I loved my time in Nebraska was the people I was with.
When I arrived, I knew no one. But it didn’t take long to make friends with many locals and other international students. At dinner, I would often be sitting around a table with ten people from ten different countries. Plus, I had a new girlfriend, which is always exciting.
During your ideal day, who are you hanging out with?
It could be family, a partner, friends or people with similar interests.
But also remember, you don’t have to be in the same room. You might have heard of the internet… You might want to answer these two questions:
Once you know who you’re with and what you’re doing, this will shape how you do it. For instance, if you want to have a chat with a friend, you can do this online. But if you want to build a house together then you’ll probably need to be in the same location.
If you get this right it will help you answer the three questions quicker and let you have more ideal days more often. The key is to:
Define your values before you design your ideal day.
This will tell you what’s important and what to include in your ideal day.
For instance, my top value is creating things so this needs to be central to my ideal day.
If you need help to clarify your values then read this post next.
The great thing about working from your values is that it also allows for variation and interpretation. While right now, I love making videos, one day this might change. But because my value is about ‘creating’ I can express this in other ways and still feel satisfied. For instance, I might write more books or create more artwork.
This leads us to an important point. When you define your ideal day, be careful about being too prescriptive. For me, saying that every day I will eat the same breakfast at 9 am is not ideal. I want some consistency. But I also want to be able to mix things up too.
Once you have written down some bullet points about your ideal day, write it as a personal vision statement. An easy way to do this is to write it in the order that it might happen during the day.
For instance, start with your morning routine. My ideal would be to wake up at sunrise and then enjoy a swim. A pool would be great. The beach would be even better.
This automatically sets up a few events that happen every day. For instance,
Here’s what I finished writing (in less than ten minutes) for my Ideal Day:
Note: Can you see why this took under ten minutes? My Ideal Day is not that long. You can write your Personal Manifesto as long or as short as you like. My suggestion is to start with a quick guide and refine it – add to it or delete bits – as you live it.
Once I wrote my personal manifesto, I realised there was only one more thing to do – go live it!
But this wasn’t going to happen instantly. I needed ways to incorporate the various elements into my life.
Some required a redesign of my lifestyle. For instance, I don’t have a personal swimming pool or a beach out the back door. But there are local pools and a beach area I could walk or drive to.
Other things required building habits, which is the key to making my ideal day happen more often. For instance, I don’t currently wake up at sunrise, but that’s a habit I can build. But I do already work on creating videos most days, so that habit is already in place.
If you want more information on how to write a Personal Manifesto by designing your ideal day, read these posts next.
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