What is your destiny? Where will you be in five years? Or 10,  or 30?

Of course, no matter how hard we search, no one can answer that question with certainty. But while we can’t know our destiny, we CAN know and change our direction.

The journey toward destiny always begins with VISION. Vision is the roadmap to your destiny, the picture of your purpose. Without it, you may find yourself off course — or worse, going nowhere.

I feel so strongly about the power of a vision that I devoted my 2009 book, Put Your Dream to the Test, to that very subject.

But even without the help of a book, you can start discovering your vision today. How?

Take some time to LOOK…

• Within you: What is your passion?
• Behind you: How have past lessons and experiences prepared you to pursue your passion?
• Around you: What’s happening to others in this area (the trends)?
• Ahead of you: What do you want to accomplish?
• Above you: What part does God play in your life and dream?
• Beside you: What resources are available to you?
• Alongside you: Who can partner with you in this pursuit?

Hubert Humphrey was a man with vision. He took his first trip to Washington, DC, in 1935, and wrote the following to his wife:

Honey, I can see how someday, if you and I make up our minds to work for bigger and better things, we can someday live here in Washington and probably be in government, politics, or service… Oh gosh, I hope my dream comes true – I’m going to try anyhow.

Hubert Humphrey’s dream carried him all the way to the United States’ vice-presidency. Where could your vision carry you? The vision you have truly will shape the person you become.

Too often we think that if we can impress others, we will gain influence with them. We want to become others’ heroes – to be larger than life. That creates a problem because we’re real live human beings. People can see us for who we really are. If we make it our goal to impress them, we puff up our pride and end up being pretentious – and that turns people off.

If you want to influence others, don’t try to impress them. Pride is really nothing more than a form of selfishness, and pretense is only a way to keep people at arm’s length so that they can’t see who you really are. Instead of impressing others, let them impress you.

It’s really a matter of attitude. The people with charisma, those who attract others to themselves, are individuals who focus on others, not themselves. They ask questions of others. They listen. They don’t try to be the center of attention. And they never try to pretend they’re perfect.

Spend today listening to others and letting them impress you.

~ From The Maxwell Daily Reader

On Twitter and Facebook on Sunday, I quoted my friend Paul Meyer, mentioning that he was the person who helped me create my first personal growth plan. In the hours afterward, I received dozens of requests, all asking the same thing: “How do you create a personal growth plan?”

The answer to that takes more than 140 characters, so I thought I’d post it here:

The key to a life of continual learning and improvement lies in developing a plan for growth and following through with it. Paul Meyer knew this. In fact, when I first met him and we had lunch, he asked me a question that changed my life: “Do you have a personal plan for growth?”

In answer, I told him about my work schedule and how much I did and how I was learning on the job.  I kept going on and on.  The more I talked, the more obvious it was that I had no plan.  Paul helped me find one.

Growth is does not happen by chance. If you want to be sure to grow, you need a plan—something strategic, specific, and scheduled.Motivational speaker Earl Nightingale said, “If a person will spend one hour a day on the same subject for five years, that person will be an expert on that subject.” Isn’t that incredible? It shows how far we are able to go when we have the discipline to make growth our daily practice.

So if you want to follow a plan, recommend that you start by identifying an area or two in which you desire to grow, such as leadership. Then start gathering useful resources – in print, online, on video, etc. Now your goal is to schedule learning time EVERY DAY. Here’s the rule of thumb I’ve used for years: read one book a month and digest one article/podcast per week.

As an example, this is the weekly schedule – 5 days a week, 1 hour a day – that I recommend for personal growth as a leader:

Monday: Spend one hour with a devotional to develop your spiritual life.

Tuesday: Spend one hour listening to a leadership recording.

Wednesday: Spend one hour filing* quotes and reflecting on the contents of Tuesday’s material.

Thursday: Spend one hour reading a book on leadership.

Friday: Spend half of the hour reading the book and the other half filing and reflecting.

The average American adult watches close to 30 hours of television per week, with little positive return. What do you think would happen if you devoted just five of those hours to personal growth?

Why not start acting on a plan today and find out? Then let me know if it was worth it.

*For my tips on how to collect and file material, read this post.

Every major difficulty you face in life is a fork in the road. You choose which track you will head down, toward breakdown or breakthrough. Dick Biggs, a consultant who helps Fortune 500 companies improve profits and increase productivity, writes that all of us have unfair experiences; as a result, some people merely exist and adopt a “cease and desist” mentality. He continues,

One of the best teachers of persistence is your life’s critical turning points. Expect to experience 3-9 turning points or “significant changes” in your life. These transitions can be happy experiences … or unhappy times such as job losses, divorce, financial setbacks, health problems and the death of loved ones. Turning points can provide perspective, which is the ability to view major changes within the larger framework of your lifetime and let the healing power of time prevail. By learning from your turning points, you can grow at a deeper level within your career and life.

If you’ve been badly hurt, then start by acknowledging the pain and grieving any loss you may have experienced. Then forgive the people involved – including yourself, if needed. Doing that will help you move on. Just think, today may be your day to turn the hurts of your past into a  breakthrough for the future.

Don’t allow anything from your personal history
to keep holding you hostage.

~ From The Maxwell Daily Reader, July 15

Well, the countdown has begun…

The final edits are complete, contributions from commenters have been added, and Everyone Communicates, Few Connect is currently at the printer.

If you remember the cover design from November, you may notice that it’s been modified just a little. After I previewed it, Justin Wise at BeDeviant.com pointed out its design similarity to the logo for a conference called Cultivate. That prompted us to revisit the design and modify it. The good news is that I think this new design is even better than the first. But of course, this does have an effect on exactly which photos made it onto the front. Fortunately, every contributor photo that we collected in the fall will be featured INSIDE cover no matter what.

On March 30, readers in the United States will find it in bookstores and online. It looks like it will be available in Europe and Asia (in English and Spanish) on the 28^th of May.

(Also, Thomas Nelson is working with publishers around the globe to make it available in other languages. We’ll share information on translations as we receive it.)

For information and for links to preorder in the US, visit Thomas Nelson’s dedicated webpage.