Barbara Sher’s Perfect Day Exercise
A great tool for figuring out your best goals for a new year.
Last night my daughter and I were talking about goals. She turned twenty-seven this year and she’ll finish graduate school in a few months. The 2020s are the first decade in her life that won’t be dictated by education.
The whole world seems like a wide-open possibility to her and that’s incredibly exciting to witness.
She’s visiting for Christmas, so she and I are going to spend some time together today working on this exercise that I’ve done every single year since I was her age (and she was a baby.)
Barbara Sher’s book Wishcraft changed my life. I found it at Acres of Books — a now-defunct used bookstore in Long Beach, California — at a point in my life when everything was falling apart. My marriage was unraveling. My son was sick, but I didn’t know why. I was floundering on pretty much every single level.
Sher offer’s this exercise and it’s so simple and so effective.
Basically — you just envision a perfect day sometime in your future, from beginning to end. I like to think about a not too distant future. Five years seems about right, because it’s far enough for pretty much anything to happen, but not so far that I don’t seem like the same person anymore.