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So many self-developping books/articles mention about being successful. And many of them put this thing as the first step: Find and focus on your goal!

Given that a life is once and short, it is the quite crucial to find your own goal. Once you find one, you just need to go for it, and the process itself is rewarding experience.

But many people I talked to come to ask the same question: “What is my goal and how to find it?” As there are tons of different goals for different person, there is no straight answer to which one is the right goal. But I think one of the ways to help to find one is go back to your past.

By going back to your past, I think there are mainly 3 things you can do: (1) visit the past and meet the people,  (2) analyze the past and (3) Organize past documents Let me explain with some examples.  

Visit the past and meet the people

Recently I had a chance to visit 2 places related to my past: Santiago (Chile) and New York (USA)  and meet the people I spent time with back then.

Santiago (Chile):
I had a chance to visit this city  and met lovely people I used to spend time with. In the end, some people already had children and big family to take care of, and some others continued on what they were doing. Through this visit, I reassured what I wanted for now and for the future (e.g. having a child is an excellent experience but not for now to do what I want to pursue).

New York (USA):
5.5 years I spent in this city was the core of who I am and what I am doing. Through the experience of being an actor, dancer, chef and teacher, I found what I wanted to do. This city also taught me the joy of learning (challenge of performer, cooking skill, Spanish, etc.). The moment I saw NY city street from the airport after 5 years of interval, all the strong motivation I had back then came back to real life (and I could not help smiling).

Analyze the past

Previously I wrote Mongolian series including the experience of why I did what I did and what I learned from those experience. I did so because I wanted to record one package and close it for the future before moving on to the next step. It will be handy to recall one page of my life.

But through this exercise of analyzing the past, I could re-assure what I wanted to do: contributing myself to education field for the vulnerable population and challenge for new learning.

I could also recall the strong motivation I held before moving in Mongolia, which gave me further energy. I guess this process of re-motivating yourself is quite important along the time and busy schedule, you tend to take everything for granted.

Organize past documents

It is always good to be back home (Japan) and spend some time with my family. I have no problem with language and food, and service are just beyond the standard. But I could realize that what I needed is not the comfort zone (not yet), and I would still like to go for challenges.

Also, this time I tried to face as much past as possible by organizing the documents, books and stuff I kept in my home countries. By organizing, I mostly mean throwing out, because saying good bye to the past stuff can open new door to the future. What I worked on this time was make all the hard copy books/documents into soft copy. I will write more detail about this in the future entry .

In short, through above mentioned experience of visiting the past and meeting people, I could set myself back on the track I wanted to pursue, and get re-motivated.

Warning: don’t get caught with the past

Although finding / reassuring your goal through past is quite useful way, it is important to keep in mind that we should not get caught with the past. For example, if you only look at the past glory (which feels pretty good) and not connect with the present and future, you might not want to challenge yourself further. So the important thing here is analyze and visit the past in order to find or reassure your goal.

Learning of this time

To find / reassure your goal and live the future fully, it is important to revisit, analyze and organize the past by analyzing or visiting.