Are you living the life you really want? Or is life living you? Do you dread waking up in the morning and going to work? Is every day the same? Is every week the same? Are you a slave to everyone else’s needs? Are you reactive or proactive? Are you focusing on what’s really important to you in your life every day? What are you accomplishing?
Sorry to bombard you with all these questions! But if you want to lead a happy and fulfilled life, you should be making choices throughout the day that are helping you get closer to living the life you really want. The good news is YOU get to create your own life. YOU get to decide what to do with your time.
With all of the distractions that are readily available at our fingertips, it can be hard to focus at times. It’s very easy to just get caught up in the comfortable routines of day-to-day life and get stuck in patterns that really don’t serve you. Let’s say for example that you dream of owning your own business. That’s what you really want. So here is your typical weekday schedule, Monday-Friday:
6am- Wake up and get ready for work (a job that you don’t really want)
7am- Commute to work
8am-5pm- Work
5pm- Drive home
6pm- Watch TV
7pm- Prepare/eat dinner
8pm-11pm- Watch TV/phone calls/texting/internet
Now this may be an oversimplified example, but this is a fairly accurate schedule for a lot of people. So if you really want to own your own business, what did you do in this typical day to get you closer to that goal? If this is your typical day, how much closer are you to that goal after a week? After a year? After 5 years? I haven’t even touched the weekend yet. If you aren’t doing anything to get you closer to your goal during the week, are you helping your cause on Saturday or Sunday?
In the interest of full disclosure, here was my typical weekend as a young adult:
Friday night after work – go out to a bar or club with my friends and drink lots of alcohol
Saturday morning – recover from drinking, wake up between 10am and noon
Saturday afternoon – watch some college football or whatever other sports are on
Saturday night – Repeat Friday night (go out to a bar or club with my friends and drink lots of alcohol)
Sunday – recover from drinking and watch sports all day
Then it’s back to the normal weekday schedule. And I repeated the same thing week after week, month after month, and year after year. It’s no wonder I wasn’t happy where I was, which only caused me to further engage in anything just to make me feel good in the moment and distract me from the life I hated, but the life I created. What a vicious cycle!
Does that sound familiar to any of you? It doesn’t matter which activities you are engaging in. Let’s keep it simple. Just ask yourself: Am I taking any steps toward my goal? I can hear the questions already: “But Mike, aren’t I allowed to have fun? Does everything I do have to be productive?” Of course you are allowed to have fun, and no, not everything you do has to be productive. All I’m saying is this: Point A is where you are. Point B is where you want to be. How close is your Point A to your Point B? If you are not where you want to be in any area of you life, you have nobody to blame but yourself.
The good news is you DO have the power to change things. It’s called the power of choice. You have the power to make different choices every day and every moment of your life. You can get up and turn off your TV, and instead crack open a book on starting your own business. If your health isn’t where you want it to be, you can make the choice to educate yourself on how to live a healthier lifestyle. You can make the choice to go for a walk instead of surfing the internet with a sugary soda in hand! Do the best you can with the time you have. You don’t have to change your whole life in a day. But if you want to get where you want to go, start making better choices that will take you in the right direction.
The results won’t come overnight, but your smarter choices will snowball down the path to a happier, more fulfilling life. It’s better to take baby steps down the path you really want to be on than to be running on auto-pilot down a path that you don’t.