Getting Your Future Right

Getting Your Future Right fills a huge gap in personal development! For perhaps the first time for many of us, using this book provides a way for any person to think about, develop, plan for, and then execute a Personal Life plan for a better life!

This is a skill we are never taught at school. It’s a skill that is rarely developed in our careers. Instead for some, the lucky few, the ‘school of life’ is the best chance they have to develop the kind of insight into making their life a success. For the rest of us, life happens by accident.

Up until now, for most of us, we just have not had a way to think about what we want for our life. For most of us, knowing what questions to ask, knowing what issues are important; and knowing how to get started is just not something that is natural.

And that is why this book has been written. It is part guide book and part workbook. It is written to assist you in Getting Your Future Right

The Quick Overview for People in a Hurry: how the book works

You will set a Vision of preferred destination for your life. If you’re not too sure what your Vision is, this book will help you consider and then write a Vision that appeals greatly to you.

You will identify the main challenges in your life. They will be those challenges that, were you to resolve them, will move you closer to your desired Vision. I call these main challenges ‘Strategic Issues’.

You’ll need to work out what skills and resources you have available to you right now. You’ll be asked to also identify which skills you will need to have available, in order to address the challenges (Strategic Issues) you’ve identified. I call these skills ‘Capabilities’

Then, having identified the Capabilities you will need and have, you work out how you will use those resources. I call this step ‘Strategic Action’ and having followed the process what you will have is:

  • A set of Actions
  • Using your available Capabilities
  • That will handle your Strategic Issues
  • That then moves you closer to your desired future, your Vision!

Very straight forward, yet very few people actually do it! The rest of the book shows you how to monitor your progress and to keep evolving and improving. But be warned – you will have to take action, to think and to apply some effort. This is no wish list. You will think, plan, then act and I’ll show you how to put this together. Best of luck!

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The model used in this book has been adapted from the model I designed for The Australian Strategic Planning Institute (TASPI) after participants in our public workshops asked me whether the appproach would work for personal planning. I responded at the time that, in the absence of any other approach, it was likely the model would be quite useful.

The feedback has been incredibly positive. The model works and works very well. But be warned! This is no quick fix book. For many people, this will be the first time they have taken the chance to think seriously about what they would like their life to be like. There is no ‘secret’ to a successful life where a simple ‘thought’ will make it all happen. In this book you’ll discover that the thought is just one part – you then need to know where to act and why. That’s what this book will help you sort out. I wish you much success!

When was the last time you sat down and really thought about the type of life you would like to create? When have you thought about what your skills were and how you would use them? How often have you felt that your life was going no-where and you weren’t sure how to make a change for the better? Through this book I’ll guide you with stories of my own up and down journey and then get you to apply what you know to making a clearer choice about where you want to be in the future.

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You are probably much, much closer to having the future you’d prefer, than you realise. For most of us (and I was one of them) we have never been taught how to put some form and structure to our approach to life. Instead we’ve just kind of stumbled along, often on ‘auto-pilot’ without even knowing where we were headed or why we were doing what we were doing.

This book is the wake up call for your life. You deserve to make your life better than what it is now. This book will help you do that

Victorian State Culinary Tourism Conference in Wangaratta

Oct 2, 2008

Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber will be kicking off proceedings at the 2008 Regional Produce Summit in Wangaratta on the 20th of October where he’ll detail some of the emerging issues likely to impact upon the tourism and food sector in the foreseeable future and suggest ways that businesses in the sector might be able to…

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Eco Industrial Parks & Community Development

Oct 2, 2008

Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber will both key note and act as Master of Ceremonies at the Lockhart Industrial symposium on the 9th of October, in Lockhart NSW. Marcus will discuss the clear business advantages that Eco Industrial parks provide to businesses, the way that symbiotic supply chains work to improve business resilience and the way…

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Marcus Barber discussing the Future on 774 ABC Melbourne

Sep 20, 2008

Marcus Barber joined host Tim Cox and co-host, author and writer Andrew Peglar on the Conversation hour to muse about the types of futures one might expect to see in coming years.   After Tim asked for clarification between a General, Theoretical and Strategic Futurist, Andrew kicked off with a question over the singularity.  The…

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Your Future Requires Planning – and so does ours!

Sep 4, 2008

Members of the Futures Foundation and the AFFA will be congregating in Pearl Beach in the coming weeks to consider the state of play in the Australian Futures community. Given the emerging challenges in Australia and around the world, the futures community requires just as much serious contemplation and forethought as does any one  …

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Robots of the Future

Jul 22, 2008

One of our many Nordic watchers, Are Thorsteinsson, has posted the Future Matters segment looking at the future of robotics, along with marking up full language captions in Danish. Although a couple of years old now, the early signs listed in this segment are only now coming into more mainstream focus Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber…

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Asking the unaskable question – Do we have a right not to die?

Jun 25, 2008

Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber has contributed a chapter to Volume Five of the ‘Death and Anti-Death’ Anthology which has just been published by Ria University. With contributors including Aubrey de Grey and Kevin Kelly and edited by Dr. Charles Tandy, Volume Five in the series is dedicated to the memory of Loren Eiseley, the renowned…

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Biofuels and Global Starvation

Jun 12, 2008

One of the challenges for one aspect of the world is fuel and the price of fuel used for private transportation. I use the word ‘aspect’ quite deliberately because the ‘aspect of the world’ that seems to be making the most noise about rising fuel prices is by and large the ‘westernised’ world – that’s…

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Marcus Barber to Open Supply Chain and Logistics Conference

May 14, 2008

With the theme ‘Moving Forward, Supply Chains of the Future’, Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber will open the Australian Supply Chain and Logistics Conference in Brisbane in July on behalf of the Supply Chain and Logistics Association of Australia. Details for the conference can be found below.   The focus on the future of supply chains…

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Book Recommendation – Gang Leader for a Day

Apr 28, 2008

When it comes to quality strategic futures work as part of making the pragmatic decisions that shifts beyond theoretical futures work, I encourage my clients to question the assumptions they make about the information they have available to them. Which is why I am recommending the book ‘Gang Leader for a day – a rougue…

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Marcus Barber on 774 ABC Melbourne Conversation Hour discussing Australia 2020 Futurists Summit

Apr 23, 2008

Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber was well and truly forced to justify the existence of his profession when venturing along to Jon Faine’s Conversation Hour last week. Co-hosted by Cath Pope the discussion looked at the role of Futurists, the Australia 2020 Futurists Summit and Jon’s scepticism around the role of futurists.. Along with Janoel Liddy,…

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