If you haven’t decided where you are headed in life, your circumstances will decide for you. It is important to intentionally decide what you want all areas of your life to look like. I affectionately call this “casting a vision.”

1. Casting A Vision Helps To Fight Away Distraction

In geometry there is a rule that states: between any two points is a straight line. This rule also applies in our lives. Your vision acts as the second point in the equation keeping you moving in a straight line toward your goal. One of my goals at work is to “produce three product videos per week.” This vision pushes me to avoid distractions and time-consuming tasks. It has also caused me to develop specific, repeatable, measurable steps in completing my projects.

2. Not having A Vision Will Leave You Shipwrecked

If you haven’t set a destination, you’re like a ship adrift at sea going wherever the current takes you. Early last year, I had to stop producing videos to help the increased load of our photography department. At first my editing was taking forever! Finally, my boss challenged me to process an image every 15 minutes. I didn’t always meet that challenge, but I realized that I was saving about 5 to 10 minutes per image while trying to hit my 15-minute mark. Over the course of a 480-minute day, that’s up to an extra 48 images!

3. Without A Vision There Can Be No Strategy Having a vision doesn’t mean you have it all figured out. It isn’t a game plan or a strategy. It is simply a destination. But that destination, I believe, is far more important than strategy. In fact, it is an essential precursor to strategy. How can you develop a strategy to win if you don’t know what winning looks like? Would a football coach be able to develop an effective strategy if he didn’t know that winning meant having more points at the end of the game than the other team? Of course not! In the same way, you have to decide what winning looks like in your life. You have to cast a vision.

Question: What is your vision for 2015? What do you want to accomplish at work, in your finances, with your family, and everywhere else in the Wheel Of Life? What does winning look like in those areas? Drop me a line in the comments!