What Would Your Life Look Like Without Limits?

What would you do with your life if you no longer had to worry about money?

It is a deceptively simple question, but give yourself a little time with it and you may be surprised by what comes to mind. Perhaps you’d travel for months rather than weeks. Perhaps you’d buy a boat and sail somewhere you’ve never been. Perhaps you’d start the business you’ve been thinking about for years, teach a skill you’ve spent a lifetime developing, or turn something you know extraordinarily well into an opportunity for other people.

Don’t edit the answer while you’re thinking about it.

Start with the impossible

Don’t immediately follow an idea with, “That’s impossible”, “I couldn’t afford it”, “I’m too old for that”, “Who would want to do that?” or the particularly effective dream-killer, “Be realistic.”

For a few minutes, forget all of it.

What would I do if I stopped putting limits on the answer?

It is an interesting question at any stage of life, but perhaps it becomes even more interesting as we move through our 50s, 60s and beyond. By this point, most of us know ourselves considerably better than we did when we were younger. We know what fascinates us, what makes us lose track of time and what we would happily never do again. We have accumulated skills, knowledge, contacts, experience and stories. We may have far more to work with than we realise.

Yet we can become remarkably good at putting those things in boxes.

“I used to think about starting my own business.”

“I’ve always wanted to teach people how to do that.”

“I’d love to travel there.”

“I’ve got an idea for something, but I don’t know where I’d start.”

Then comes the practical voice, usually before the idea has had time to breathe.

So what if we silenced it for a moment?

Imagine you have enough money to remove the financial question from the equation. You don’t have to keep working simply to pay the bills. You don’t have to ask whether a new venture will provide an income. You don’t have to calculate whether you can afford the equipment, the course, the trip, the workshop or the time involved.

What would you choose?

What does your vision reveal?

The answer may reveal more than a list of things you’d like to buy or places you’d like to visit. It may reveal something about the kind of life you would actually like to create.

Perhaps you’ve spent forty years working in a particular industry and discovered you rather enjoy teaching people. Your vision might involve opening a workshop where you pass on your woodworking skills. Perhaps you have an extraordinary knowledge of New Zealand’s back roads and dream of creating small, specialist tours for people who want to see a side of the country most visitors miss. Perhaps you’ve spent years photographing wildlife, restoring cars, growing unusual plants or researching local history and wonder whether your passion could become something much bigger.

It doesn’t have to become a business, either. You might want to spend a year documenting disappearing crafts around New Zealand. You might want to learn to sail properly and cross an ocean. You might want to create a community garden, establish a scholarship, restore a historic building, mentor young people entering your former profession or devote several years to a cause you care deeply about.

There is no requirement for a vision to be sensible, modest or easily explained. It may stretch you a little. It may require you to learn something completely new, or admit you don’t know how to get from where you are now to where you’d like to be. It may even sound slightly mad when you first say it aloud.

Perhaps that’s not such a bad place to start.

The interesting thing about imagining a life without limits isn’t the fantasy of having millions in the bank. It is the opportunity to remove one of the strongest filters we put over our own thinking. Once money stops being part of the question, even temporarily, we can ask something much more revealing: What do I actually want?

Perhaps you’d leave your current work tomorrow. Perhaps you’d never work another day. Perhaps you’d start working harder than ever, but on something entirely different. Maybe you’d employ people, teach people, build something or create something. Maybe you’d stay exactly where you are and transform what you do with your time.

There is no right answer, and having a vision doesn’t mean you need to blow up your existing life. Sometimes a vision simply gives you a direction you haven’t considered before. It can make an ordinary Tuesday feel different because you have started thinking about what might be possible rather than simply accepting what already exists.

Don’t solve the problem yet

For anyone approaching retirement, or already there, this can be particularly worth considering. Retirement is often discussed in terms of what we are leaving behind: the job, the deadlines and the obligations. Perhaps we should spend a little more time considering what we might be moving towards.

Not a list of worthy activities to fill the hours, or a programme for becoming a better version of yourself. A vision is something you would genuinely like to see, experience, create or contribute during the years ahead.

It doesn’t have to be enormous. Your vision might involve finally having the time to learn something you’ve always been curious about, spending more time making things, sharing a skill with others, travelling somewhere you’ve always wanted to see or simply having more freedom to choose how you spend your days. It could be something you’ve thought about for years but never quite given yourself permission to pursue.

The important part, for now, is not working out whether you can afford it. It is discovering what you would choose if you didn’t have to think about the cost.

Once you’ve answered the question, you have something much more useful than a vague feeling you ought to “do something” with the next stage of your life. You have a possibility to examine. You have somewhere to begin.

Don’t rush to turn it into a plan, let the idea sit with you for a while. Think about it while you’re driving, walking, making dinner or lying awake at night. See whether it still appeals to you tomorrow, or next week. Let yourself add to it, change it or discover the part of it you find most exciting.

For now, you don’t need to know how much it will cost, where you would start or whether it is even practical. You have spent enough time putting limits on the possibilities. Give yourself a little time to imagine what you might actually want.

Next week, we can worry about reality.

Stay tuned.