10 Reasons Why You Should Write Your Own Personal Manifesto

1. A manifesto can help you focus your life by emphasizing your priorities and what’s most important to you. You might think you don’t actually need to write a manifesto in order to know what your values are. But we all have a million little things in our lives that are important to us in varying degrees. We are all surrounded by countless little distractions that can make our priorities a little less clear. A manifesto can really cut through the fog and help us focus in on what’s most important.

2. It can help you figure out which things you should keep as a part of your daily life and which things you need to let go of. I’m all about this. Once you decide what’s really important to you, you also start to see what’s not. A manifesto can help you de-clutter your daily habits.

3. It can help you guide your actions when you’re not sure in which direction to go. Your manifesto can serve as a framework for how to live your life and a guide for how you should respond to new, challenging, or difficult situations. It can be particularly helpful in helping you handle things when times get tough by reminding you of your deepest rooted values.

4. It can serve as a source of motivation and help you make positive changes. Putting your values and ideals into words and reminding yourself of those guiding principles on a daily basis causes you to examine the reality of your life more closely than you otherwise would. A manifesto can really help you to examine your life more objectively, and it can be the best reminder to practice what you preach. Did you live your manifesto today or did you mostly just watch TV? A manifesto can help keep you accountable.

5. Writing down your goals can help manifest them. This one is huge. The act of putting your goals into words and physically writing them down is absolutely critical to achieving them. Make it official. Make it visible. Make it happen.

6. You’d be in good company. Many successful people and organizations have written manifestos of their own. For real. Have you seen my list of 8 amazing manifestos? Many famous people, such as Ben Franklin, Audrey Hepburn, and MLK, have all verbalized personal manifestos in some way. So have companies such as Apple and Lululemon. And I’d say they were all at least a little bit successful or influential, wouldn’t you?

7. A manifesto can challenge you to be the best possible version of yourself that you can be. If we all lived out our ideals every day, think about how awesome we would be. Think about how much of a better world we would live in. Sure, there are some people whose manifestos I would shudder to see (*cough cough Donald Trump cough*), but I believe that most of us are good and decent people who value kindness and love and all of that wonderful stuff. We need to manifest more of that in our lives and in the world at large, don’t you think?

8. It may just inspire you to do something big. Writing my manifesto and thinking about how I wanted to live it inspired me to start the quest that is Project Delici8. It’s also the very basis for this blog. Who knows? Maybe your manifesto will inspire you to finally get the guts to do something crazy too.

9. A manifesto can help you spread your ideas and share them with others. If you choose to make your manifesto public, it could start a really cool conversation and get other people to think about their lives more consciously as well. You might just end up inspiring others. And that certainly wouldn’t suck.

10. And why the hell not? What have you got to lose? Just do it, and see what happens.

I’ll show you mine if you show me yours… Check out my manifesto here!