Are you ready to bring your dreams to life? In this video, I’ll share how to create a five-year vision that will transform your future into a clear, actionable strategy. I’ll walk you through why having a vision matters, how to set big, audacious goals, and how to reverse-engineer them into annual and quarterly action plans. Whether you’re a seasoned real estate investor or just starting out, this step-by-step process will help you move intentionally toward the life you envision.
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Bring your dreams to life with a five-year vision. I’d like to share a quote with you from Dan Sullivan: “The only way to make your present better is by making your future bigger.”
That’s what I’d love to share with you today. As we look ahead to 2025, I’m going to walk you through how I periodically create a five-year vision for my life and then use that vision to work backward to create my annual plan for the year, such as 2025. Once I know what I want to do that year, I create my quarterly plan, and that guides me to the specific activities that I need to do and focus on each quarter so that every quarter I am making progress toward reaching my five-year vision.
In this video and podcast, I’m sharing my wisdom from creating visions and plans for years. Whether it’s your first time or your tenth time creating a vision for your future life and breaking it down into an annual action plan, you’re going to find takeaways that will make this easier and more effective for you.
As we dive into this five-year vision, I really want to start with why we do this. Why do you need to take the time to think about where you want to be in five years? For some people, this is a really tough thing to do, and you deserve to know why you’re doing this work.
First, let’s think about if you were going on vacation. Do you just show up to the airport and see where the flights are going? That would be crazy, right? You plan it out. You make sure you know where you’re going. You choose a place you want to go to, and then you set up everything to have success at that place.
You make sure you have the right clothes for the weather. You read about what to do there so that you’re ready to go do these activities. Maybe you go ahead and make some reservations or appointments beforehand for things that are popular.
We take that for granted for something as simple as a vacation—we’re going to think about and be intentional about it beforehand. Yet, often people don’t put in the same amount of effort in planning where their whole life is going to be in five years. By doing this planning, you can optimize your efforts and activities to most easily reach your desired life goal destination in five years.
When we know where we want to go, we can make sure all of our actions are helping us get there and not wasting our time doing other things. That’s the first reason I believe in doing this visioning: so that we know where we want to go, we can optimize our actions to get there, and we don’t waste time, energy, or money on anything else.
The second reason I believe in this so much is because progress compounds. By working toward your five-year goal starting now, you’re setting the foundation that you will build upon in future years. You’ll build on what you do now so that you can definitely reach those goals by year five, if not earlier.
If we don’t know where we’re going and we don’t start laying that foundation, it shortens our time horizon for getting it done, and we’re not able to have that compounding. If you’re a real estate investor, you know the power of compounding with money and other aspects like that, so we can apply the same thing with our time.
Now, I have a specific example of how progress can compound. As you may know, I’m currently traveling the world with my family full-time. We are digital nomads, and I had a vision a long time ago of us traveling the world together. But in my vision, my kids were a few years older, and we were a few years further along.
Because I had this vision, we prioritized travel immediately so that we could teach my kids how to travel. You can’t go from zero to 100, right? Kids don’t go from crawling to running races. They usually start with some walking and some missteps. I knew that for my children to travel well, where we could do it all the time and have it be a joy, it was something we needed to train for.
We did trips. We weren’t traveling full-time, but we did a lot of travel during their school holidays. As an example, I traveled over 10% of the time in 2023, and much of that was as a family. Because we had that vision of where we were going to go, we were able to start taking those baby steps of taking some trips, teaching my children how to travel, how to behave in hotels, how to work with elevators—all of that.
We learned and built our skills for travel. When the opportunity presented itself that we were selling our last in-person business and everything else was virtual, I was able to jump on that. We started traveling sooner than I had originally envisioned—honestly, three years earlier than I had planned. We’re able to do it well because we had been laying that foundation and taking those baby steps, knowing where we wanted to go.
I have one more reason, my third reason, why it’s worth it to take the time to do this visioning: it activates the reticular activating system. Once you know what you’re going for, you’re going to start to see opportunities to get there.
For example, when my husband and I were doing our normal family finance meeting after I decided to sell my real estate team, we were able to realize that we could start traveling full-time now, not a few years down the road. We had activated that reticular activating system to look for travel opportunities and identify them when they presented themselves.