The best way to understand whether you will be satisfied with your vision once you achieve it is to implement your vision today.

Of course, most visions can’t be done today, otherwise they would be your current life, not your future vision. However, you can test small parts of your visions early.

Activities

If your vision involves doing an activity, see what you can do now:

• Become a Volunteer
  Find a place to volunteer where you can start doing some or all of the activity today. For instance, if you want to be a radio announcer, volunteer at your local community radio station.
• Join a Club
  Find others who are doing the activity, or a related activity, and join them. For instance, if you want to become a public speaker, join Toastmasters. Meetup.com is a great place to find these groups.
• Shadow Your Future Self
  Find someone who is doing what you want to be doing and ask to follow them around for a day. This enables you to see what a real day looks like versus your idealized day. You can even do this virtually.
  Alternatively, be in the vicinity of these people, so you can watch what they do from afar. For instance, if you want to become a therapist, you could volunteer as a receptionist at a local mental health clinic.
• Do a Challenge
  Attempt to do the activity for a short period of time at high intensity to see if you can sustain and enjoy it. For instance, if you want to write a novel and are unsure whether you can commit to writing every day, participate in National Novel Writing Month or an equivalent challenge.
• Develop a Side Hustle
  Rather than becoming a volunteer, do your future activity as a paid gig. Use this to test not only the main activity itself, but all the work required to support that activity. This can be useful after you’ve already tested the main activity itself.
  For instance, if you want to be a consultant, you could start doing free consulting. Then, if you like that, try to get paying clients to determine whether you’ll also enjoy the process of marketing, sales and accounting.

The important thing when testing your vision is to test those aspects of your future vision that you are most unsure of. If you already know you enjoy talking to people and want to become a salesperson, you may need to test whether you can ask for the sale or handle all the behind-the-scenes administration work required.

Often these things are hidden. To uncover these, use the next step in this tool to ask others who are already living your vision.

Acquisitions

If your vision involved owning something, try to get access to it early to see if it meets your needs:

• Borrow
  Find someone who has what you need and ask to borrow it. Explain your vision and why you need it; often people have stuff they are not using that they’d be willing to lend out, especially if you have a good reason.
• Rent
  Don’t acquire it outright, but rent it instead. This provides a way for you to test drive the item before committing significant resources to it, and can accelerate your vision if the main thing blocking you is acquiring the item.
• Use
  Instead of finding a way to bring the item to you, go to where the item is. Classes and community spaces often provide resources for others to use that would be cost prohibitive otherwise.

Hobbies often fall into this category, where you need to acquire basic equipment before you can participate in the hobby. Use these methods to test the waters before you commit large sums of money into a new hobby that may not fit you.

Accomplishments

Unfortunately, there’s no great way to test accomplishing something without actually accomplishing it. Use the next step to interview people instead.

Create Your Test Plan

Work through the Test Your Vision Worksheet to decide what to test and how to test it. Use the links below to download an editable Word document or the PDF.