Stop Dreaming and Start Creating Your Week

I used to regularly dream about the concept of making my life an “achievement”. But it turns out that it just left me daydreaming most of the time, debating the various what-ifs years from now.

So then I started thinking about living my life like it was going to end in six months. Scary I know — but it worked; I took more risks, went on more adventures, and became a little happier for it too.

But even then, I knew it wasn’t quite right. The fear of missing out, as opposed to the love of creating my life, was what was driving my behaviour.

There had to be a better way.

So I started thinking about the concept of creating my week as beautifully as I could. Through the lens of Monday to Sunday, I didn’t have too much space to daydream.

If I wanted to play an instrument, I had to dedicate a day to it. If I wanted great relationships, I had at least meet two to four friend friends each week. If I wanted to be the kind of person that reads, I had to read a book each week. If I wanted to be a competitive footballer, then I had to find a way to play football every week.

You Can Make The Future Seem Less Intimidating

Everything broken down into a week felt lighter. The heavy shoulders I slumped to work with vanished slowly. I felt more enthusiastic, made more plans, took more action, and I was exhilarated by life, in the present. 

All I was doing was creating my week as best as I could, and leaving the rest to the universe.

Don’t get me wrong, even with this mindset; there were still some rough weeks. Weeks where I felt my life was in tatters and nothing was working. But come to think of it, it was only ever because of outside circumstances. A bad breakup, an argument, a money issue, and so on. – otherwise everything improved drastically.

What I Eventually Realized

Changing your week to reflect your ideal life can happen right now. Your week is a meaningless, empty canvas. But with your brush, you can stroke the flames of your life into ecstasy. Just like a painter, you can create a masterpiece.

You will always lead your life between Monday and Sunday. If you don’t at least try to create the most epic week possible now with what you have, you’re going to be less likely to create an epic life.

Creating your week is an art, but an art that has no completion. It’s continually in motion, either for the better or, the worse, because time moves forward whether you do or don’t.

If you keep stroking that paintbrush into your week (your canvas), you will be continually morphing, adjusting, learning and growing. If you continue stroking new colours into your life, you’ll be improving on the little imperfections, learning from the mistakes, and moving forward.  

There will be weeks where things don’t work out the way you want, but because you have a weekly context, you’ll be less perturbed by a bad day. Embracing the week will allow you to have better emotional resilience.

The World Has Fooled Us

Outside sources have plodded up ideas into your mind from a young age about what you could be and or even what you should be. The underlying assumption behind the question: “What do you want to be when you grow up” is: you need to fit into a standard to feel worthy.

This lodges itself in the bottom of our hearts and minds.

We’ve Let The World Define Our Standards of Success

The whole way success is viewed is backwards – a lot of what we’ve learnt is plain wrong. Instead of predominantly focusing on achievement as our metric for success, we ought to focus on designing our week – because that’s where our life is lived. We can experience the good life right now, in this week! But we don’t – because we think we need to climb mountains before we arrive.

And while it is helpful to dream about the future on occasion so that we can feel a little more inspired, what’s even more rewarding is: living from a place that allows us to be inspired each week. Every Monday, we get given a series of days that will never replicate themselves again. 

Let’s make the most of it.  

My Last Words

If you’re a creative and interested in learning how to improve the way you live your week, read my free book on Spiritual Productivity.

• You’ll learn about how to split up your day into four chunks, so you worry less about external influences.
• You’ll discover the small hacks that will take your creative work on your PC to the next level.
• And much more…

 Samy Felice is a writer who is passionate about unique ideas related to living a meaningful life. His Free Book explores ways people can make success easier.