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lifeFocus: Achieving a Life of Purpose & Influence by Jerry Foster with Ed Stewart (2004)
How to Get Where You Want to Go
Foster starts the book by describing the “Vector Principle”, which is used when flying an aircraft, but can just as easily apply to our lives. The Vector Principle notes that achieving a desired outcome in your life is the result of consistently making positive choices that vector you toward that outcome. Most successful people get where they want to go by taking one simple step after another in the right direction and make minor course adjustments over time.
How do you define success?
A lot of people measure success by achievement. They are driven to work harder, faster, and smarter; log more hours; and sacrifice other pleasures. As a result, many people arrive at their destination disillusioned and unfulfilled.
Take money and material possessions, for example. Whatever our income level, it never seems to be enough. At the root of the world’s view of success is the insatiable quest for more. Affluence is defined as “an abundant flow or supply”. Many Americans are inflicted with “Affluenza,” which can best be described as a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more. We now work more hours each year than do the citizens of any other industrial country, including Japan. In fact, 95% of our workers say they wish they could spend more time with their families.
If we continually choose work over family, or community over self, or leisure over responsibility, at some point all the balls will hit the floor at once. Is any of that true for you? Can you see the “vectors” (choices) that are leading to that result?
Foster urges his readers to begin measuring success in terms of true personal wealth, which incorporates the whole of your life. If you choose true personal wealth, you must be intentional and purposeful in your desire to achieve success across the board in your life.
The Path to True Personal Wealth
LifeFocus leads to lifeWealth, or the accumulation of financial, relational, physical, intellectual, and spiritual capital.
Imagine this scenario: see yourself in your nineties…in your ideal setting. What do you hope you could say about the life you have experienced? What would you like to see on the bottom line of your experience portfolio as your life draws to a close? Is your mentality to retire from something or to something? Is retirement the end or another, more exciting beginning? Life expectancy for retirees who just check out of work to do nothing is only about 8 years. It’s as Dr. Howard Hendricks says, “The day your past becomes more exciting than your future is the day you begin to die.”
You can’t change your past, but you can change your future. One of the sayings I like says that the best time to plant an oak tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today… You can plant an oak today by committing to and taking steps toward acquiring true personal wealth.
Focus Your Vision
It’s difficult—if not impossible—to accomplish anything of significance if you don’t have a crystal-clear vision for where you want to end up and a rock-solid plan for getting there. When Christ was asked about the “one thing” God seeks from us, he quoted Old Testament law, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”
Live Purposefully
To move toward true personal wealth, use the ASAP lifeFocus process:
- Assess where you are
- Strategize where you want to be
- Act on your strategy
- Perform Progress Evaluation
Remember, if you continually measure yourself by how far you have to go, you will be disappointed. But if you turn around and see how far you have come, you will see progress.
Every experience, both good and bad, equips you for a more focused journey. As Samuel Butler said, “Don’t learn to do, but learn in doing.”
Equip for Success
You can do one thing in life to virtually guarantee your failure: try to make it on your own. Each of us needs a team of people to help us stay on track and encouraged as we live out our vision. The more people you have around you to sharpen you, the more effective you will be.
Accountability partners care enough about each other to ask the tough questions. Meet you’re your accountability partners regularly, at least a couple of times a month. Share your ongoing vision with one another, both the successes and failures. Affirm each other, encourage each other, and challenge each other to hang in there.
Give from the Heart
A key strategy for acquiring true personal wealth is to give generously to others what you have. It’s like Jesus said, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”
Generosity is not related to how much or how little you have; it’s about your attitude toward what you do have. We have great capacity to be generous with our love, kindness, and caring for others. An attitude of generosity springs from a thankful heart. And we can only be thankful when we step back and count our blessings. Take inventory of your life and notice what you have. Then realize how little it would be without the help of God and many others who generously helped you get where you are.
Don’t let anybody mislead you with the lie that quality time with people is better than quantity time. In reality, quality comes out of quantity. Foster explained, “When I sat down with my children intending to “make quality happen,” it usually didn’t. But when one of the kids and I were out running errands or attending a ball game or working on their homework, we often ended up spending some quality moments together.”
Enjoy the Journey
Note that you will mess up along the way because everybody messes up. We are all subject to mistakes, selfishness, impatience, intolerance, greed, hatred, jealousy, laziness, and envy. True contentment is available in the midst of the journey, even when it is difficult.
Contentment allows you to keep moving forward no matter what life may throw at you.
It is difficult to achieve contentment in a culture in which enough is never enough and more is always better. Paul’s formula for success was to put God first and be content with what you have—be it little or much.
Relational contentment incorporates three basic elements:
- You need a mentor—at least one trusted, mature individual who is willing to share his or her guidance, wisdom, advice and instruction with you.
- You need a friend. Along with a wise mentor, you need a committed friend among your relationships. While your spouse should fill the role of your closest soul mate, you should develop at least one deep, encouraging friendship with someone of your sex.
- You need a protégé. Another bare essential for contentment in a life of influence is at least one relationship in which you are a source of influence to someone in whom you can pour your life.
To attain true personal wealth, consider the words of wise King Solomon, “Lazy hands make a man poor, but diligent hands bring wealth.” If you don’t get on the road and busy yourself with the task of living out your vision, you will never enjoy the rewards of true personal wealth…
May your lifeFocus help you achieve a life of purpose and significance, as you shoot for the stars!