Planning

Planning

Defining and Improving Your “Life Architecture”

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, September 20 2023

One of my first ever blog posts was about creating a “life architecture roadmap”—in other words, assessing the current state of your life and identifying your desired future state so that you could create a roadmap filled with practical next steps and milestones to get there. The idea is a play on Enterprise Architecture, a discipline in which...

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Planning

Where Do You See Yourself in Five Years?

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, August 30 2023

In the immortal words of Creed Bratton of The Office, “If I can’t SCUBA, then what has this all been about? What am I working toward?” While this is quotation is meant to be funny since a man working an office job (with plenty of references to drugs, murder, and other seedy activities during the workday) for decades was all leading up to a...

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Planning

Create Your Life Strategy in Four Easy Steps

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, May 18 2023

Having advised executives for roughly 20 years at the time of this posting, I can tell you that I’ve had over a thousand conversations on strategy. These conversations are/were about 30 minutes long, meaning that I’d have to convey a lot of information in a short period of time. That makes it necessary to simplify as much as possible, making the...

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Planning

Writing Your Life Résumé

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, May 10 2023

I've spoken before about how HR departments cracked the meaning of life and success by optimizing professional growth within their organizations. In there, I linked to the life résumé template for folks to create their own. Today, I'd like to talk a little bit about when, how, and why you should create your own "life résumé" to plan your own...

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Meaning

Why Do You Even Need to Find Meaning in Life?

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, March 16 2022

When people are busy with school, work, extracurricular activities, and keeping a roof over their heads, they might not have time for much else.  Consequently, they might wonder what people are doing being reclusive and pondering their existence.  After all, why do people think about the meaning of life instead of simply living?  Well, there are tw...

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Planning

When You Are Feeling Behind in Life

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, January 19 2022

“I was supposed to have a spouse and kids by now.”  “One of my classmates from high school is now a CEO.”  “I’m so far behind in my retirement savings.”  People naturally compare their life progress to others, and they start to wonder what they need to do to “catch up” to others when they fall behind.

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Planning

Dying Before You Are Recognized

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, December 29 2021

Everyone dreams of getting recognized for what they’ve done or the kind of person they are.  Many people throughout history inspire people today for all that they’ve done for humanity.  However, there is one depressing reality about many of those people who are revered for their accomplishments: so many of them never achieved even remotely the leve...

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Planning

Setting Success Measures in Your Life

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, September 15 2021

Success.  It is what everyone talks about striving for.  But what is success?  Is it earning a lot of money or having a family?  The American Dream, for example, was the secure job, the house with the white picket fence, the spouse, ~2 kids, and a dog.  Is that success for you, though?  And even if you could define what success was, how would you k...

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Planning

When to Think, and When to Act

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, September 1 2021

Figuring out what you want in life is difficult.  You can spend hours agonizing over decisions.  There’s a reason why ice cream shops offer free samples and many products and services offer trials: experience can be the best teacher regarding what you want or don’t want.  So, how do you know when additional thought and discussion versus when more e...

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Planning

You Didn’t Choose to Be Born...But Should You Act Like You Did?

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, July 28 2021

You might not have chosen to be born, but you're surprisingly better off acting as if you had. You know the scenario: a parent and child get into an argument.  There's usually some sort of pressure on the child to behave in some way or meet some set of expectations that results in the now-cliché response, "I didn't choose to be born!"  What is caus...

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