Life Scripting Part 1— design your perfect life on paper and make it real
“No one is ready for a thing until he or she believes he or she can acquire it. The state of mind must be belief, not mere hope or wish.”
Napoleon Hill
Can you actually design your ideal life, your perfect environment? Can you write out a description of your perfect days and then make it real? Yes you can! Read the latest WriteTech blogpost to learn how.
Life Scripting will show you how you can design your ideal future life by describing in the present two very specific manifestations of that life: first, your ideal environment, and second, your perfect day.
This blog post is all about writing our life scripts. Each one of us is the author of the script we want our lives to follow; each of us is also the director who alone is responsible for staging that script on the grandest stage of all — our own lives.
Many of us, at one point or another, have wished our lives to follow a certain path or lead to an eventual destination. When we were children, we fantasized about growing up to be someone or something someday. Without us realizing it, at that moment, we were scripting our lives. When I was a child, my earliest desire was, like most boys I suspect, to become an astronaut, like Neil Armstrong. Later on, I wanted to be President of the United States (never mind the fact that this was impossible since I wasn’t born in America!). And soon after, I dreamed of becoming a lawyer one day, just like my parents.
As a child, at each of these phases, I scripted a scene in my imagination, depicting my most perfect day, in which I would be doing things and spending time the way I would if I were already what I dreamed of becoming. I spent a lot of my time daydreaming about these scenes.
As children, we were all experts at daydreaming. From a very young age, many of us were already starting to practice life scripting, or at least the beginnings of it.
I bet many of you too mentally wrote your life scripts and played them out in your heads a lot, just like I did. When I imagined these mental scripts of my perfect day, I’d make everything in it exactly the way I wanted it to be — from the room I was in, the people around me, the things I was doing, words I was saying, to the sounds I’d be hearing. It was my script of my perfect day, I was the author and director, and everything that happened that day was just the way I wanted it. I imagined this and it felt awesome!
Did you know that the top 10 kids’ dream jobs are: dancer/choreographer; actor; musician; teacher; scientist; athlete; firefighter; detective; writer; and police officer. Kids typically want these jobs because of the excitement, the fame, or the chance to help other people.
If you are among the kids who dreamed about having these jobs when you grew up, then you must have been scripting your ideal day from the time someone asked you, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”
How many of us though actually get to live those perfect days when we grew up as adults? If we didn’t drop our childhood dreams, and as adults still want them, are we fulfilling them? If your childhood ambitions naturally changed as you got older, that’s different. That’s just the natural evolution of your goals. But what if you never stopped dreaming about being the rock star, famous dancer, renowned scientist or celebrated athlete? Did you eventually become any of those people? If not, then you’re not alone.
Mental scripting is not just limited to children. Even as adults, many of us at one point or another find ourselves wishing that we could change careers, and be someone or do something completely different.
We may have abandoned our childhood dreams, but we now have a new dream — to reinvent ourselves, to follow our passions and our true callings, and do something that fills us with excitement, zest, joy and fulfillment, to make a difference in the world and the lives of other people.
At various times when you’re at your desk in the office or commuting to work or home, you must have mentally scripted your perfect day, a little slice of your perfect life, just like you did when you were a kid. Let me ask you a question: did your mental script eventually play out in reality? Did you end up living the dream? Again, if the answer is no, then you’re not alone.
Have you ever wondered why some of us don’t become what we once, whether as kids or adults, imagined ourselves becoming, why the mental scripts of our perfect days never eventually played out in reality? The reason is because we never moved past fantasizing and wishing.
Wishing versus receiving
Napoleon Hill, author of perhaps the most famous self-help book from the 20th century, Think and Grow Rich, wrote:
“There is a difference between wishing for a thing and being ready to receive it.”
He also wrote, “No one is ready for a thing until he or she believes he or she can acquire it. The state of mind must be belief, not mere hope or wish.”
So yes, we continuously script our lives. But for some of us, the reason why we never get to play out these scripts in reality, why we never end up living the perfect days we imagined, is because we only wished it would happen for us one day.
In order for that script to be elevated from the state of wishing for something to happen to believing it will happen, for us to move from day-dreaming to being ready to receive that which we’ve imagined in our mental scripts, we need to write out that script!
Writing a full-fledged description of what you want is one way of saying you believe that it’s attainable and you are ready to receive it.
The more precise you can be with your description, the readier you will become to actualizing it. Write your mental script in detail — not only depicting your goal, but rehearsing what the particulars of your life will be like once this goal is achieved.
If you want your dream life to happen, you must script it. This is the first step that will remove your daydreams from the realm of wishful thinking and take it to the arena of your life’s coming attractions.
Describe what a normal day would be like for you if you had already successfully reinvented yourself and become the person you once imagined yourself to be, doing the things such a person would do. If you feel you’re not particularly imaginative and are having a hard time imagining, let alone, writing a description of, your perfect day, then keep reading. The exercise described below may help.
Twenty things you enjoy doing
I credit the late Barbara Sher, whose book Wish Craft, helped guide me in my own process of life scripting. I’ve followed Barbara’s processes as described in her book and they are life-changing.
Let’s start the process of life scripting by simply listing down twenty things you enjoy doing. List down whatever comes to mind that causes a reaction in you, which fills you with excitement. Designing your life really should be no more complicated than creating your own version of your favorite dish. You get to choose the ingredients that will be in the dish. So naturally, you would only include the things that you like and leave out anything you don’t.
So, let’s list down 20 things you enjoy doing. Yes, you must come up with 20, that’s the only rule. Apart from this, there are no rules.
Anything goes in your list — from serious, important stuff like “working for myself, growing my business, or planning my future”, to seemingly trivial things like “walking my dog, meditating, sketching people, or cooking”. If you list down 19 things and you’re struggling to get to number 20, just write anything, even “doing nothing” or “listening to the grandfather clock tick in my living room” is pretty good.
The reason why you need to list so many is because this will stretch your imagination and force you to really think about the components of your perfect day. Come on it shouldn’t be that hard! After all, these are things you like doing!
Draw a chart, with two columns — a left-hand side vertical column, and a right-hand side horizontal column. On the vertical column, list down the 20 things; there’s no need to rank them; it will be impossible to rank them anyway because these are all things you enjoy.
On the horizontal column, write the questions below. You might have to turn your paper landscape style to fit these.
Q1: How long since last done?
Q2: Costs money or free?
Q3: Alone or with someone?
Q4: Planned or spontaneous?
Q5: Work or family related?
Q6: Physical risk?
Q7: What do I like about it?
Q8: Involves mind, body or spirit?
For example:
20 things Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q5 Q6 Q7 Q8
Name Activity 1 here
Name Activity 2 here
These are only suggested categories; you can add any other ones that come to mind. If there is one principle that I would want to impress upon you more than any other, it is this:
Through your thoughts and writing, you have the power and ability to reshape the world to suit you.
In fact, it is your God-given right to do so. As with any of these WriteTech techniques, if you can adopt any of them, improve on them, or tailor them to fit your own needs based on your own insights, go for it!
Debrief: what’s your style?
Style is your identity, it is your own unique voice, it is who you are. It is the truest expression of your talent, creativity and imagination.
These questions might help you process what you wrote in your chart:
- What did you learn about yourself from the things you like doing?
- Did you spot any patterns?
- Do several of these things share one or two aspects in common (for example, a love of travel)?
- Is there a big disparity between the list of 20 things you enjoy doing and the things that you’re currently doing in your day to day life right now?
- Do you see a gap (wide or small) between the quality of your life now and the life that you’d like to live based on the top things you like doing?
By analyzing the activities you enjoy doing, along with the people, places, and things that are indispensable to these activities, you start getting an idea of your own personal style.
People commonly associate the idea of “style” with external expressions: how you dress, the way you decorate your home or flat; the kinds of music, movies and books that you like, and it can even extend to the types of food and restaurants you like. Style is normally thought of as something fun, quirky, unique and individual; but ultimately, it is regarded as something extra, trivial, optional, and dispensable.
But style goes way beyond these external expressions; style is your identity, it is your own unique voice, it is who you are. It is the truest expression of your talent, creativity and imagination, not what you do in your job or for work, but the deepest expression of yourself.
It is impossible to completely suppress your style, even though society, our families, friends, peers and social networks tend to suppress aspects of our style when they expect us to behave in certain ways.
Our style will ultimately find expression and leave clues behind in many areas, such as, for example, in the things you most enjoy doing. You need to honor this expression and take these clues seriously because they will tell you how to design your perfect life. By knowing and listening to your style, you will be able to script your perfect life environment.
Once again, read over your list of things you most enjoy doing; as you do so, start piecing together your personal style. Taking a good look at your own style can show you many things about who you really are and what you truly want. You get to understand and know yourself more, and doing so will give you a sense of confidence that you did not have before.
Read Part 2 of Life Scripting HERE.
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Jonathan Temporal is an author, lawyer, university lecturer and occasional Aikido teacher. The preceding blog was excerpted from his book WriteTech: How to harness the power of writing to achieve audacious goals, solve any problem, and radically re-engineer your life.
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