Writing Your Vision - Doug’s Five Year Vision Statement

By dougnau on Apr 7, 2008 in Consciousness, Tools

Foreword: If you have not read my article on developing your personal vision and you are not familiar with the vision statement writing process, you may want to begin by reading the article Developing the Vision first, or listening to podcast #2 Develping your Vision which thoroughly explains the topic. If you are already familiar with the vision writing process, then this article provides a fantastic and real life example of how one is written. It also provides a full disclosure of my personal vision. I hope you’ll find this useful!

Doug’s Five Year Vision Statement

Vision: January 1, 2013

Amazing how life pans out. I am 38 years old now, My wife and I have been so fortunate to have two beautiful and healthy children. Chanelle now 5.5 years old – going to kindergarten, and our youngest is now 3.5 years old – wow, they are such amazing kids and we have a truly blessed family. Sometimes its hard for me to imagine that I was ever diagnosed with CML as it doesn’t effect my life in any way. The new studies and medications that are available today have doctors to the point that they are going to officially label the CML as ‘cured’ soon – wow!!!

Needless to say – life is good. We still live in Lincoln, CA, our house is beautiful, each of the rooms is fully furnished exactly as we had wanted :O). There are always projects and things we want to work on (like hardwood floors/marble counters) but none of them are a necessity and we love how the house is right now. Our yard is beautiful. You could even call it ‘mature’ as the trees are large, they are producing lots of fruit, our vineyard is beautiful and we’ve got so much privacy with our well designed plan. We love it here!

Martine is doing very well. Five years ago she cut back her work to four days/week and a couple years ago she began working at one office 3 days/week. Her office gave her full benefits for this and that’s been a terrific adjustment. She’s much happier working now, she still makes a significant income. We’ve always been happy together and this continual hours reduction has really just helped to relieve any tension she once had around work.

To build on that, it never hurts that our financial situation has really blossomed. Our long standing plan that I would make significantly more money than my wife has become a reality. And it actually did not take a long time to do this once I focused on financial expansion. After my diagnosis – my focus became self discovery and personal growth. In 2008 I realized that I had made the changes I needed to make and it was time to begin growing wealth. Not just for us but such that I could share my talents with others. In essence, I gave myself permission to grow rich. This was a turning point in my life. I began writing with i-grow.net and revenue started coming in with my private business. This has flourished into a very popular website that brings in money from a number of streams of revenue. I focused on opportunities with Sutter to grow while maintaining reasonable boundaries with my personal life. The result, within a 5 year period I have quadrupled my income, now making significantly more from my personal ventures than from the Sutter work. We are so blessed and all of the smart decisions, life focus and action has paid off substantially. I am a businessman an awesome money manager, and I make a difference in people’s lives – which is where my passion lies.

We have set financial goals for 8 or 9 years now and we continue to be pleased because we exceed them every year. Several years ago we bought our first rental property which began generating positive cash flow shortly thereafter. There was a decline in the housing market for a number of years, this was a huge opportunity to get in & we did. Although we have not cashed out on any properties (that does not make financial sense), I have become a savvy investor and we own a few now that are all breaking even or are cash positive. The one we like the best is our tropical getaway, we rent it out but love going there for vacation (and we have plenty of vacation time!).

As for our 1 million dollar 10 year goal (that would be for 2016), well its 3 years away. In reality, we probably wont have one million in a cash/stock account. We’ve learned much smarter places to put our money, but truth be told, if you take property values into account we’ve reached that million dollar goal already! OK its not as liquid, but there are serious tax advantages the way we are doing it and we still sit on a large chunk of cash which is invested diversely that we can tap into any time we need. One hundred thousand dollars really sounds like chump change now when we talk dollars and cents – its amazing how your perceptions change with time.

I am thrilled that I’ve always maintained my physical activity. I go to Golds Gym regularly and get at least 4 days/week in of exercise still. I am 38 but people would probably guess I were 30 if they didn’t know my age. I take care of myself very well and am in fantastic physical shape. The kids love physical activity too (they must see dad doing his thing :O) ), and I think we’ve got some real promise for rising stars on the tennis courts. Man its fun to see the kids grow up (and what a blast Christmas was!).

Last year we got a new car. – I finally sold the mustang and got myself a nice full featured (blue tooth enabled etc) car, that is very comfortable but at the same time not overly indulgent – our priority is still not cars. We are not frivolous with spending our money and we make wise decisions. The explorer is still running great, getting a bit older, but we’ve had a fantastic run with it!

As we look into the future we do consider moving to a new house with some acreage at some point. Canvasback has been such a great neighborhood and the kids love it, but we’ve had a vision to move more into the hills for a while. The only challenge is the kids with school and a commute that might bring about. Not sure when it will happen, but I’ve got my eyes open for deals.

As I’ve gotten myself more engrained in the wellness movement I’ve found myself getting somewhat involved with the politics of wellness-its different and very interesting. I speak regularly at work, at private meetings and as a keynote – this has really been a blast and it also promotes my private business and writing. Things have fallen into place so well.

Family continues to be a growing priority. With increased wealth we are able to visit more with my sister,mom and dad, and my wife’s family up in Seattle (they are doing fantastic too). My nephew is in his 20’s now and my niece is a young woman – its nice to be a bigger part of their lives.

We look forward to many more years to come and its just been amazing to live with clarity, focus, ease and grace. We are so grateful and share that in the way we live our lives.

I hope this has brought clarity to the vision writing process for visions greater than one year out. The only modifications that I have made are regarding the specific financial goals and also some of the specific names and identifiers that may be personal of nature. As you’ll note,there are some very vague statements which in actuality are very specific in my real vision statement. In case you have not read an example of my one year vision statement, see the related article - Writing your Vision - Doug’s 1 year Vision Statement. Until next time, Adios (yes I am enjoying the sun in Mexico still…)

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