Footprints and Monuments

“Your Life Is One Big Puzzle”

By Jeff Earlywine

Making changes in your life can be puzzling. Do you have dreams that you desperately want to see happen? Do you desire to excel farther and faster than those around you? Do you want to discover and reach your God-given potential? If you answered, “Yes” to any one of those questions you are definitely not alone. I would venture to say that most of the people that you work with, live with, and compete against want those same things.

Over the past thirty years I have found many things to be true in life. Such as: if you run out of gas in your car you will slowly come to a complete stop, you can’t make pancakes on a BBQ grill, and once you buy the car of your dreams you start seeing them everywhere. I have also discovered that structuring your life is very similar to putting a jigsaw puzzle together.

In quizzing many people who like to put puzzles together I have found that most start with all the edge pieces. Perhaps they do this because these are the easiest. The correlation of this and living the life that you want to live starts on the outside and moves inward. The easiest way to get your life moving in the direction that you want it to is to institute a personal growth plan. Below are some steps to help you develop a personal growth plan…

Make a personal commitment to yourself to grow
Continually have a plan to grow in your area of giftedness
Create a growth environment
Stay in your gift zone, but out of your comfort zone
Ask someone to hold you accountable

The next step that most people take in putting a puzzle together is to find similar pieces and build from there. Perhaps they will start on all the sky pieces, or an object that is on the front of the box. There is something powerful about being able to see something, and then do it. The correlation here is finding someone to model your life after. I have found that this is one of the best ways to grow to my preferred future.

I challenge you to find someone that has acquired the type of lifestyle that you want and model your life after him or her. You might want to break your life down into the following areas and chose different people in each area:

Personal abilities
Family relationships
Professionalism
Financial
Health

Don’t think that you have to pick people you personally know. If you admire someone that is famous then read everything that you can get your hands on about this person.

To continue with our puzzle analogy, don’t force it. Don’t force a puzzle piece into a spot where is just does not fit. In life you must spend time learning about yourself. What makes you tick… your personality, your present skill set, your strengths, your passion, etc. What you must never do is put yourself in a position or expect something of yourself that you are clearly not able to do – or don’t have the interest in. Don’t get me wrong, challenge yourself greatly, but in areas of passion and interest.

Lastly, when putting a jigsaw puzzle together, especially those that have thousands of pieces, you must realize that it will take a lot of your time. It could even take days or weeks. The reward comes when you stick to it, and connect one piece to another until the entire puzzle is done and the picture is clear. It works the same way in your life. Each day is a new puzzle piece. If you plan your growth and grow your plan, you will achieve the life you always wanted.

I encourage you to spend some time this week developing a personal growth plan, select at least three people to model your life after, make a commitment not to give up, and live life with passion.

Now, with that said I fully believe that there is one caveat to this process. Stay tuned, the caveat will be revealed in next month’s addition of Footprints and Monuments.