I hope to help you answer some simple questions that impact every
detail of your daily life. Five Ps will help you determine the value of your work
in the grand scheme of things:
- Passion: What is your mission? The first P focuses on the driving forces
behind your journey. Without purpose, pursuing life, liberty, and happiness can
be frustrating. Possessing even a sense of your meaning naturally triggers an
accelerating and self-fulfilling alignment—from your work options to your
social endeavors to your purposeful pastimes.
- Proficiencies: What can you be the best at? The second P asks you to triangulate on the most powerful combination of innate skills, values, and experiences you
can muster, equipping you with a custom-made walking stick, hand-crafted for your
adventures. This is the “how” by which you actualize your mission
and passions, in a variety of settings.
- Priorities: What is most important to you? The third P helps you define the importance of specific aspects of your journey, both now and in your future. This
is why in your “daily scheme” context, you choose to allocate your
lifetime to particular endeavors with the tacit understanding that as certain
parts of your lifetime move, other parts might also require transitioning.
- Plan: How do you bring yourself to market. The fourth P provides a tactical roadmap for your excursion, replete with milestones and budgets. Generating this
plan before you start is pragmatic—you don’t want to get lost en route
to your promised land. This P lets you define the length and ruggedness of your
path, based on your intrinsic openness to various sorts of risk.
- Prove: How do you fund your plan? The fifth P gives your outputs a test while soliciting whatever support you might need. For those whose income supports more
than one outcome, getting buy-in for your plan is essential. Then, whatever next
steps you need to make are trodden with the knowledge of a network, the confidence
of confidantes, and the belief that belies any perceptions of potential failure.
Summing thoughts from the first three Ps creates two powerful outputs.
First are visions of potential journeys, both present and future, that you can
explore or plan to start. Second, a work/life domain of your making and control
will appear. Identifying your niche is a primary purpose of the 5 Ps. You will
draw on and codify its supporting elements in the fourth P.
The five Ps hone your ability to focus your mind and efforts on a
few key actions. Why is focus so important? Because life has a mischievous way
of distracting you. There is always something else drawing your attention, a multitude
of other uses of your time.
The flipside of generating a plan is actually implementing it. It
doesn’t matter how slick your plan—if you cannot execute it with discipline,
its failure is assured. Discipline means putting most distractions aside and following
through on what you have created. To these ends, process outputs have been formulated
for easy implementation because you will inevitably be sucked back into the maelstrom
of mundane matters that are an unavoidable, although reducible, part of life.
Because this plan has been designed by you and benefits you, attacking
its execution with discipline should be easier than trying to follow prior directives.
You decide whatever process results you want to actualize—you are the only
one who can ensure your plan is implemented to your standards. PE
