On balancing living with life
Motivation is a major key to success. Whether trying to buy a new house, get a promotion at work, become balanced, or otherwise, being motivated to work toward your goals is an important requisite.
My question for you today is that of where you find your motivation. How do you stay happy when things try to bring you down? How do you take a step toward your goals every day?
Setting goals is an effective way of getting many things accomplished. However, for personal finance and similar activities, there is an even more important task at hand: setting priorities. Prioritizing is a process similar to goal setting, but there are some subtle and conspicuous differences which are important to know and master.
There are few things in life that come for free and the vast majority of those that do are completely worthless. Whether something costs money, energy, or time does not matter, only that there is some marginal cost for a benefit. Such is the law of responsible consumerism: something should only be bought if its benefits outweigh its costs. Just like everything else, being a balanced person comes with great benefits as well as great costs, which are sometimes not always in balance themselves. (more…)
“The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” – Chinese Proverb
People regularly make excuses for why they cannot and will not do something that needs to be done. Crossing items off the to-do list becomes infinitely more complicated than it actually is when one simply does not want to do something, but cannot admit that to oneself.
Particularly susceptible to the curse of excuses are long-term goals – ones that will take weeks, months, or even years of dedication and steady effort. Learning a second language, getting into shape, and mastering balance are hard to complete and even harder to begin. Such is where the quote above comes in: true, it would be wonderful to have finished something by now. But the best alternative, and what we will focus on in this article, is to take a step toward completing your goal right now.
This quote makes many uncomfortable for a simple reason: it forces you to conjure into mind images of what should already be begun and over. It brings into sight great regrets that are overwhelming. I wish I would have tried harder in high school and that I had been working on getting into shape ages ago. I want a scholarship and a body which suits my strong will and tough mind. Indeed, we all have a goal we should have began working on ages ago that has no end in sight presently.
But perhaps one day, there will be an end in sight. Perhaps we will meet that goal. Would you prefer to meet that goal in a year or a year and a day? Begin today. Go do a couple crunches. Stop eating junk food now. Say no to slacking off and do something for money so you can start saving for retirement. Do it now. You will be much better off in the long run.
The first step to fixing any issue is to identify it. As I do not want to assume there is any issue, let’s say the problem which has led you to read this website is that your life is out of balance. Specifically, I will assume that your life is not balancing well with your career.
Whether you are a small business owner or a blue or white-collar worker employed by somebody else, the steps to achieving balance and the problems resulting from a lack of such are the same. You will have less time with family, derive less joy from living, and fail to work at your full capacity.
One-Year Tightrope is a blog about balance. It is powered by Wordpress and based on a custom theme by Michael Hoppal.
Copyright © 2009 by Michael Noker.
