To make a life plan. As a refresher, a life plan is a transcendent purpose, decomposed into measurable goals, decomposed into tasks over time, decomposed into today's to do list. The first step in making a life plan is to choose a transcendent purpose. You get to choose this, no one chooses it for you
. You're free to use or not use other people's work in this other people's ideas. But at the end of the day, it's your choice. And when you're making that choice, there are various ways you can come up with ideas for what this might be. But whatever you choose really needs to be the most important thing
to you. The reason for this is that a lot of the power of this approach comes in your ability to automatically subordinate anything else to this purpose. You need one governing thing that's most important. So uh many people have suggested specific purposes or even ways to come up with purposes such as
imagining what you want your obituary to read or how do you want the world to be a different place because of your life? Most ways of, of brainstorming ideas for this are going to generate something that's much longer than you want your transcendent purpose to be. It really needs to boil down to one
sentence. If it, if it's not that brief, you haven't distilled it enough and you're probably dealing with a set of goals instead of a purpose. You need to keep hammering away till you get to that purpose. The second step is to answer the question, what measurable goals would indicate you are achieving
your purpose. So purposes transcendent purposes aren't really measurable. And the only way to know if you're progressing along a purpose is to distill that or decompose that into measurable goals. Measurable goals are measurable, which means that you know, whether you've achieved them or not, and that
measurability becomes very important when you're decomposing that goal into the tasks that you believe are necessary in order to achieve it. So there's no hard and fast rule for measurable goals. Although some people have tried to make him, you might find those things useful. But at the end of the day
, the the key thing is it just you need to be able to know what the the successful state looks like in a way that you can actually measure it. You have to define success. Now, those goals, you're going to decompose into tasks over time. And that's the next step, what discrete tasks must be accomplished
in order to achieve each measurable goal. It's not drawn here. But basically each step of this process is going to fan out into multiple things. So going from a transcendent purpose to measurable goals, you're going to have more than one measurable goal. Now, for each of those, you're going to have a
list of tasks that you need to accomplish over time in order to achieve that goal. Now, the the mapping from goals to purpose is just what you really believe it would be. It's more free form, the mapping from goals to task. It's less free form. It has much more to do with how the world actually works
. Those tasks are going to yield the measured achievement of the goal. It just it it can't be very loosely defined. You really have to find out what it takes to achieve those goals. The next step is, is going to be taking these tasks over time and breaking them down even further, resulting in the enumeration
of a list of things that you need to do today. Now, this is where so we were branching out from purpose to goals to tasks over time. All of it comes back together because you only have one to do list for today and you might have many goals and many tasks for each of those goals. But those all have to
feed into one to do list for today. So that's important and whatever you do today, it's going to yield the greatest progress towards your goals that can be accomplished in a single day. So it takes your transcendent purpose, which is your highest priority and it breaks it down into what you will do today