Your Epic Adventures
First of all, you need to think about what would make an adventure epic to you. For some of you, this will be easy. You likely have ideas swimming through your mind just waiting to be tried. For others, your ideas might be more subtle. You may even think to yourself, “I don’t have any epic adventures hanging around in my head.” Take a minute to think about past ideas that you have let drift away throughout the years that you thought would be so fun to do, but just never did them. Write them down.
What types of things do you enjoy? Maybe you enjoy movies and music and an epic adventure could be flying to Boston to watch John Williams direct the Boston Pops or to get into a movie premier in Hollywood. Or maybe you love the water and you’ve had the thought of how much fun it would be to sail the world. Don’t limit your ideas with how others may define epic adventures. Everyone has different ideas and what may seem uninteresting to one person, may be the next person’s epic adventure.
The Five Steps
The following five steps will help guide you to choose which of your adventurous ideas you should pursue. If you follow this simple five step process to determine the potential success of any idea, you will more likely complete it successfully. The five steps begin with an Idea:
Step 1—Idea: Every success starts with an idea. Keep your idea clear of other people’s influences. There are no good or bad ideas.
Step 2—Desire: We filter our ideas by our desire. Do we have high desire or low desire?
Step 3—Vision: Our vision is the cornerstone of everything else. We need to clearly see our idea to completion. If your vision is clear, you can write out a plan.
Step 4—Motivation and Commitment: Motivation is what you expect to achieve and this inspires Commitment. If your desire is high and your vision is clear than your commitment to stay the course remains strong.
Step 5—Willing Action: To succeed, you must act. What are you willing to do to see your idea through to completion?
Idea Number One
Now, let’s walk through these five steps with an epic idea. Let’s start with the idea of going sailing. Now that may not be an epic idea if it’s something you do all the time. What makes it epic is sailing to every continent in the world. Once you have your idea, don’t let other people influence you and tell you if it’s a good or bad idea. No idea is good or bad. It’s simply an idea.
Whether you should pursue that idea or not depends on step two: Desire. How big is your desire? Is it low or is it high? When you really think about it is it just a fancy whim that came to your mind or is it something you would really love to do? Does the thought of sailing to every continent make your heart race? For this example, let’s say your desire is low. When you really think about it, spending days on the ocean between each continent simply doesn’t sound that appealing. You like the idea of visiting every continent, but you really don’t want to be on a boat that long. Maybe your desire is at a two. So drop the idea. If you don’t have a high desire, you won’t complete what is necessary to follow through. Accept this about your idea and move on.
Idea Number Two
Idea
Idea: kayaking. How to make that idea epic, Kayaking with Eagles swooping around you, grabbing fish out of the water next to you. Is this an epic idea? Sure thing, especially when doing so in your area requires you to go out in sub-freezing temperatures around Christmas time. Ah, yes, this is an epic idea.
Desire
So where’s your desire? Let’s say it’s at a nine. You may be a little unsure about the freezing temperatures, but this slight hesitancy, is quickly overridden by your heart pumping as you visualize yourself among the eagles in your kayak on a lake in December.
Vision
Step three is Vision. When you have high desire, your vision of expected results becomes very clear. If your vision isn’t clear, you may be lying to yourself about how high your desire is. Can you see it? Can you clearly see yourself among the Eagles? Does your vision clear away any possible hesitation you may have felt? You may not know exactly what to expect but if you can clearly imagine eagles overhead, fish down below, and your kayak gliding through the icy water you are ready for step four.
Motivation and Commitment
Motivation is the reason you are going to follow through to successfully obtain those results you clearly envisioned. Commitment is either high or low. It needs to be very high to carry you through the times when things take longer than you thought, cost more than you expected. When you lose support or resources you thought you’d have. Commitment and Motivation will also affect how clear your vision is.
Are you totally committed to making this trip happen? When a storm hits, or your friends back out are you going to let the dream stop or will you work through those roadblocks to make sure you kayak among the Eagles?
Action
Not just any action, WILLING ACTION. This is action you want to do. This is action that you don’t have to talk yourself into doing. The more you follow this guide to epic adventures, the more you learn to identify your willing actions.
Now it’s time to act. You meet your friends at the dock all bundled up in your winter gear, your kayak at the water’s edge. You and your friends push off and begin to paddle. As the water freezes on the top of your kayak and you watch the eagles soar and then dive at the water right near you grabbing a fish, you think, THIS IS EPIC!
Now it’s your turn to imagine. Can you imagine running your own ordinary idea through a simple five steps? If you can, this is your first step to having your own epic adventures.