I took yet another hiatus from this hobby of mine that feels like speaking into the void. A strong part of me felt like by trying to do everything I was doing that I was failing at them all simultaneously and needed to dial in on one thing at a time.
The issue is: my life isn’t structured in a way that I can do that yet.
I have to devote attention to disparate things due to how my life is currently designed. The “aha” moment I had was that I still wasn’t intentionally choosing the things that mattered each day for those disparate things.
It took me taking a step back for about a month or so when I was deep in my intense feelings of burnout to recognize things that should have been obvious.
I was busy trying to maintain constant motion instead of acting intentionally.
I was hoping staying busy would maintain momentum and I would be able to break through.
I was not making time for genuine rest and strategic thinking.
I was racing through everything trying to check all of the boxes as quickly as I could hoping that by completely my constantly growing to-do list I would be able to get ahead and get to the point that I could focus on what matters.
The to-do list instead became a leviathan of increased mental load I was carrying around and reminding me of all the things I hadn’t finished or even started yet.
I’m not saying that to-do lists are bad. I am saying that you shouldn’t be a slave to things that don’t matter yet. Every great man had a million things to do and a million opportunities in front of him and yet he was still able to apply a filter to see through the noise and do what actually mattered.
It’s easy to apply that type of thinking from an outsiders perspective. It’s another thing entirely to try and take a step back from your own life when you are stuck in the forest trying to navigate out without any map or sense of direction.
This month or so that I took for myself to come back to Earth I realized that everything has a time and a place as well as a cost. We all intensely want things right now, but we cannot sacrifice what is necessary to achieve those things quickly, at the same time, or without a certain time commitment.
You can’t build a perfect relationship in a day, a perfect body in a week, or a perfect business in a month. You have to start from wherever you are now and focus on moving the needle forward bit by bit each day through compounding actions.
I think the worst thing that happens to us when we are in the thick of things in everyday life is that we forget our why. Forgetting that why makes each decision become a lot less clear and you say yes to things too early or no to things at the wrong time.
You need to have a filter to understand which decisions to make and which actions to devote energy towards each day.
To do that you need to know where you are aiming towards. You need to really know and understand the end goal you have and constantly refine what that is so that it becomes more clear to you each day.
It doesn’t have to be something you necessarily can explain to others when asked, but it has to make sense to you and be something you can access and draw upon in order to create that filter.
Funnily enough, I rediscovered my why by going through an exercise I was creating as a lead magnet for this newsletter. I created an audit for you to go through and gain clarity about your life as it currently is versus the life you wish you had.
The only thing separating you from the life you wish you had are the actions and behaviors that are required to live that life.
While pondering the above, I realized that sitting and waiting out this period was going to cost just as much if not more in the long run than if I just started aligning my actions and behaviors with the life I wanted.
Once you have that filter, the things that seemed like obstacles start to melt away and the only obstacle becomes the only thing that had ever been holding you back: yourself.
If it costs something to sit around and do nothing to advance your life in the way you want or to intentionally choose something each day, isn’t it better to be actively choosing your costs instead of having them decided for you?