This is perhaps the most difficult point in this section. Before you dive into the practice of planning, you must be clearly aware of what you want from life. You need to recall your hobbies, who you would like to be, or whom you would like to resemble. For this, you might reread the chapter "Circles of Interests" from my first book "How to Master Productivity and Planning?". Figuring out your desires and interests is a major problem for many people, and for years they try themselves in the most diverse fields. This can apply both to work and career and to personal pursuits.
It really is very difficult. First, you need to realize that most people drift through life like something brown that floats down a river, doing nothing useful day after day — neither for themselves, nor for their loved ones, nor for society as a whole. Second, on top of that, most people do what they think is something important, while this "important" thing is needed by no one, including themselves. Therefore it is extremely important:
a) to decide what you want from life (at least for the next year or two);
b) to make sure that it is truly important to you and that the time spent will really be worth it.
I roughly know what I want from my life. I have detailed plans for the coming years, plus some rough drafts of plans even up to 2038. Of course, taking into account various force majeure and circumstances. No doubt these plans may still change, and that is perfectly normal. You need to be flexible and adapt to life's situation. However, as experience from humanity's toughest trials — from the pandemic to mass sanctions against the country where I live — shows, my plans keep working like clockwork.
The same cannot be said of most other people. Many have no idea what they want from this life. The overwhelming majority of adults over 40 do not know what they want. Family, their own house or apartment, a car, stable work and similar things — that is what most people of that age want. They do not even realize that they live in an age of opportunity, and that everything listed above is not the end point of goals but rather the starting point. Having achieved all of this, the adult generation effectively stops developing and lives out the remaining days without global goals. Or they tie their goals to other people — for example, to children whom they need to marry off successfully and then wait for grandchildren. Older generations spend their resources very inefficiently and wastefully: time, money and health. That is why they achieve success only at a fairly mature age, and as a result, after that they no longer want to set global goals. This is also because their end goals (which I actually consider starting goals) were instilled in them by their parents, who in turn received them from their parents, and so on. A lazy retirement, a dacha, fishing, raising grandchildren, and in rare cases travel — that is what most people aspire to and drift toward. Such people could not even form goals in their entire lives, let alone achieve them.
If you think teenagers and young people have gone much further, you are mistaken. Sometimes they do even crazier things than the adult generation. As a rule, they have goals. But these are the same banal goals as adults': finish school, get some education, get a job, get a driver's license. Okay, what next? Next, yesterday's goal-driven teenagers get burned in the very first minute of the match called "the harsh everyday life," when they have to work 8 hours at a boring and unloved job, get up for it at 6–7 a.m., return when it is already dark, and receive a meager wage for it. Of course, some will still build long-term plans, but most likely these plans will boil down to the plans of older generations that I described above.
I will not judge either older or younger generations, because when all your time and energy go to primary needs — earning money needed to live — there is practically no strength or time left for self-realization and achieving goals. Nevertheless, so that life does not feel like a log floating down a river, everyone needs to decide what they want from this life. If you cannot do this, it will be hard for you to set goals and build plans. But even if you do not yet have goals and are simply drifting with the current, do not write yourself off too early. The practical part will still be useful for you. You will develop the habit of setting goals and checking in with them, and when you finally decide what you want, you will already be ready to do it most effectively.
