My Lifelong Learning and Vision

I met with my fellow Toastmasters this morning, and delivered a prepared speech titled "My Lifelong Learning and Vision".

As a veteran manager, during my career I had communicated with my team countless times about our corporate vision and mission, but I had never talked in public about my personal vision. It was challenging in the sense that I had only five to seven minutes to tell the story of my personal vision that has been present and evolving in the last 40 years. Still, it's a great practice for me and I enjoyed sharing my personal story with a room of like-minded friends. I also felt connected, as if I were seeing my younger self in the audience, listening to my speech attentively.

As usual, we had an interesting meeting theme today: Old Memory, under which everyone shared an old item, the story behind and its meaning to him or her. To this end, I shared the story of the old wardrobe in our bedroom that was bought when I married my wife, and we will be celebrating our 32nd anniversary next month. What a warm and loving memory!

Here's the script of my speech today, which covers the background and evolution of my personal vision, while the details of my vision plan will be elaborated on in my next speech:

"My lifelong learning and vision" 

Do you have a vision for the next 10 years of your life? 

If you do, how did you come up with your vision?

Good morning everyone!  It’s my honor to share with you something that sounds serious but is very important in my experience. Yes, as suggested by my learning Pathways and my opening questions, today I’m going to talk about my personal vision.

To start with, let me define what a personal vision is in my own terms: to me a personal vision is an ideal state you wish to reach in the future, so it guides your effort and investment, like a compass of your life journey. And, to me life is a journey of endless learning, so I make my speech title as "My lifelong journey and Vision".

In fact, I renewed my personal vision earlier this year, but before coming to that I have to talk first about my old personal vision, that basically stood throughout my career. It was established in the last century, in the 1980s, straight forward though not easy, like this: to have a loving family and good career development, and if possible, to pursue personal interest as well.

My old vision was actually quite typical for my generation, the so-called Babyboomers generation (born between 1946 and 1964). Back then we had a famous term called the Five-Haves, the common life goals shared by my generation: have a house, have a car, have a wife, have children and have money. These goals sound chauvinistic today but it was unintentional. Above all, it worked for many people, including me.

Fast forward to 2022, with my own efforts and help from many friends and colleagues, and some good luck, of course, I retired as planned, and my old vision of having a loving family and good career development, as well as the goal of Five-Haves were all realized. In addition, I also cared for my personal interest and cultivated healthy habits of doing exercise and reading English.

Now my two children are all grown up and my wife still works, it’s time for me to establish a new personal vision, with focus switched from family and career to personal interest and well-being.

In this connection, I referred to my favorite theory called Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which includes five levels: the first level, at the bottom, is physiological needs, the second is safety needs, the third is love and belonging, the fourth is esteem, and the fifth, also the top level is self actualization. And, after some self-assessment I found myself on the 5th level, self-actualization, of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

With this finding and deliberations for some months that followed, I came to the conclusion that I want to live my life that is well connected with the outside world, as it was during my career through reading, communicating and traveling. On the other hand, I want to know better about the land, people, culture and history of Taiwan, my own country. 

With that, my new personal vision was established, with a statement like this: To live my life rooted in Taiwan and connected with the world. To pursue lifelong learning and personal interest in a 3-Self manner: Self-actualization, Self-appreciation, and Self-entertainment.

Under this vision statement, a vision plan has been developed, but per the guidelines of my learning Pathways, I should elaborate on it in my next speech.

To conclude, I used the tool of personal vision to guide my younger self and to achieve many goals in my life. Now, in my retirement, the circumstances I’m in are totally different, so my old personal vision doesn’t work any longer, and therefore I came up with a new personal vision, which is: to live my life rooted in Taiwan and connected with the world. To pursue lifelong learning and personal interest in the manner of Self-actualization, Self-appreciation, and Self-entertainment. A detailed plan has been developed to this effect, and I’ll elaborate on it in my next speech.

That wraps up my speech today. Thank you for your attention. TMD!