Step 5: What Geographical Factors Are Most Important to You, and in What Places Do You Think You Would Do Your Best Work?
The Point of This Step: To answer this question: to the degree you have a choice—now or down the line—where would you most like to live?
Why This Is Important for You to Know: Human beings are like flowers. Our soul flourishes in some environs, but withers and dies—or at least becomes extremely unhappy—in others.
What You Want to Beware Of: Thinking that where you live is not important. Or thinking, if you have a partner, and you each want to live in different places, that one of you can get their way, but the other is going to have to give up their dream. Nonsense! If this were part of a course about Thinking, what would the Lesson be? The subject of the Lesson would be: how can two partners, who initially disagree, learn to agree on a place where both get what they want?
In case you haven’t got a clue, there is an interesting exercise you can do. It begins with your past (the places where you used to live), and extracts from it some information that is tremendously useful in plotting your future.
It is particularly useful when you have a partner, and the two of you haven’t yet been able to agree on where you want to live.
DIRECTIONS FOR DOING THIS EXERCISE: 1. Copy the chart that follows onto a larger (e.g., 24 by 36-inch) piece of paper or cardboard, which you can obtain from any arts and crafts store or supermarket, in your town or city. If you are doing this exercise with a partner, make a copy for them too, so that each of you is working on a clean copy of your own, and can follow these instructions independently.
2. In Column 1, each of you should list all the places where you have ever lived.
3. In Column 2, each of you should list all the factors you disliked (and still dislike) about each place. The factors do not have to be put exactly opposite the name in Column 1. The names in Column 1 exist simply to jog your memory.
If, as you go, you remember some good things about any place, put those factors at the bottom of the next column, Column 3.
If the same factors keep repeating, just put a checkmark after the first listing of that factor, every time it repeats.
Keep going until you have listed all the factors you disliked or hated about each and every place you named in Column 1. Now, in effect, throw away Column 1; discard it from your thoughts. The negative factors were what you were after. Column 1 has served its purpose.
4. Look at Column 2, now, your list of negative factors, and in Column 3 try to list each one’s opposite (or near opposite). For example, “the sun never shone, there” would, in Column 3, be turned into “mostly sunny, all year ’round.” It will not always be the exact opposite. For example, the negative factor “rains all the time” does not necessarily translate into the positive “sunny all the time.” It might be something like “sunny at least 200 days a year.” It’s your call. Keep going, until every negative factor in Column 2 is turned into its opposite, a positive factor, in Column 3. At the bottom, note the positive factors you already listed there, when you were working on Column 2.
5. In Column 4, now, list the positive factors in Column 3, in the order of most important (to you), down to least important (to you). For example, if you were looking at, and trying to name a new town, city, or place where you could be happy and flourish, what is the first thing you would look for? Would it be, good weather? or lack of crime? or good schools? or access to cultural opportunities, such as music, art, museums, or whatever? or would it be inexpensive housing? etc., etc. Rank all the factors in Column 4. Use a clean photocopy of the Prioritzing Grid if you need to.
6. If you are doing this by yourself, list on a scribble sheet the top ten factors, in order of importance to you, and show it to everyone you meet for the next ten days, with the ultimate question: “Can you think of places that have these ten factors, or at least the top five?” Jot down their suggestions on the back of the scribble sheet. When the ten days are up, look at the back of your sheet and circle the three places that seem the most interesting to you. If there is only a partial overlap between your dream factors and the places your friends and acquaintances suggested, make sure the overlap is in the factors that count the most. Now you have some names that you will want to find out more about, until you are sure which is your absolute favorite place to live, and then your second, and third, as backups.
Put the names of the three places, and/or your top five geographical factors, on the Flower Diagram, on the Where petal.
7. If you are doing this with a partner, skip Column 5. Instead, when you have finished your Column 4, look at your partner’s Column 4, and copy it into Column 6. The numbering of your list in Column 4 was 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. Number your partner’s list, as you copy it into Column 6, as a, b, c, d, etc.
8. Now, in Column 7, combine your Column 4 with Column 6 (your partner’s old Column 4, renumbered). Both of you can work now from just one person’s chart. Combine the two lists as illustrated on the chart. First your partner’s top favorite geographical factor (“a”), then your top favorite geographical factor (“1”), then your partner’s second most important favorite geographical factor (“b”), then yours (“2”), etc., until you have ten or fifteen favorite geographical factors (yours and your partner’s) listed, in order, in Column 7.
9. List on a scribble sheet the top ten factors, and both of you should show it to everyone you meet, for the next ten days, with the same question as above: “Can you think of any places that have these ten factors, or at least the top five?” Jot down their suggestions on the back of the scribble sheet. When the ten days are up, you and your partner should look at the back of your sheet and circle
Adventure
