2) Foresight

Almost as important as work, foresight plays a very important role in creating order in one’s life. Work without foresight is random and unfocused, and rarely effective. Anyone can work and try to do things to remove chaos from their lives, but those who do so with foresight are able to see how their work affects their lives not only now, but tomorrow as well. Working with tomorrow in mind helps you to avoid taking actions that seem right, but derail your progress in the long run.

A single step in the right direction is worth more than ten in the wrong direction. Without foresight, you can work hard and have many successful failures; in simpler terms, you achieve something, but it’s not the right end result you desire. This will then necessitate a backtrack, to get back to the right track, which wastes time.

Foresight is also a skill you can strengthen. It gets better with practice like the whole cognitive process does too. Since foresight is a skill dependant on our awareness of the overall direction of life, it can be strengthened by consistently paying attention to what happens in your life, when and why. Study the effects of decisions you make and ponder on how you can change things. You should also make efforts to retain lessons you learn in life, because they are the key to avoiding mistakes in the future.

When your decisions are born of foresight, you also graduate to being proactive. The two, foresight and proactivity, are so close to each other in meaning and effect that they seem fused. The difference is seen when you realize that foresight is an ability and proactivity is a state of being or trait, or mindset even, that comes as a result of using foresight when making decisions.