Most people live their lives by focusing on what they have to do. The endless tasks continue to mount up, and we wonder why we never feel like we’re getting ahead. It feels like we’re sprinting on a treadmill just trying to keep up, and every task completed is quickly replaced by new ones. Life gets a lot simpler when we stop to ask ourselves why we do things.
What Is The Purpose Of Your Life?
Now this is not some big esoteric question that you will ponder for a lifetime. It’s really just something that you decide for yourself and can change at any time. What is the list of things that are most important to you in your life? I find it helps to write down things that you really love doing. Maybe it’s spending time with friends and family, doing a particular hobby, your job, or traveling. The answers are going to be different for every single person reading. What’s important… is what’s important to you. It’s very hard to improve your life if you don’t know what improvement actually looks like for you personally.
Refining Your List Of Priorities
Once you have your initial list, you want to look at what’s really important to you. You do that by asking yourself why you love it and why it’s important to have it in your life. I’ve been doing this exercise over the last 3 years and found that my list got more and more refined as I went. You also want to look at how much time you put into these activities that you love. Do you get to spend as much time as you’d like with each one, or do they get pushed to the back behind the other tasks in your daily life?
Discovering What’s Really Important
If you made another list of all the things you are actually doing in your life, then you’ll probably find a bunch of things you don’t really love. Some people may hate cooking and others will love it. Everyone is unique, and this is about finding out what you want to be doing… not what you feel you should be doing. It’s easy to fill our lives up with things that don’t really matter to us. The trick is to ask ourselves how we spend less time doing unimportant things and more time doing the things we love. It’s not a perfect process where you can drop everything right now, but as you focus from this point on, you’ll be amazed at the results.
Always Ask Why
Whenever a new item comes across your plate, you simply ask yourself why. Is it really important to join that new committee for your child’s school or would it be more effective to actually spend that time with your children instead? Does it matter if you miss your gym time at lunch because your boss needs you to work overtime or is your fitness break more important to you? As I said before, everybody will be different. Some will rank career over fitness and other’s will rank it in reverse. What matters is that you’re making the choice that is right for you.
It May Sound Simple… But That Doesn’t Mean It’s Easy
Our world is full of expectations that are placed on us by others… and also by ourselves. We’re expected to be super people that run around and accomplish a myriad of different things every day to be great at work and at home. People will often look at you strangely when they ask you how you are and you don’t answer with “busy” with that frantic look in your eye. However, once you start examining your life through the lens of why, you’ll start asking yourself, “What’s important to me?” You need to step away from society’s expectations and start focusing on and refining your own expectations instead. When you do this, you’ll see the world from an entirely different viewpoint and be free to improve your life in any area that really matters to you.
