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Don’t put your life on hold; do it now.
By John DeVries | March 1, 2008
Have you ever caught yourself saying things like:
“I’ll do it when…”
“Once I lose some weight, I’ll look better and then I can go to the gym.”
“I’m just not ready to try yet.”
“Once I make more money, I’ll travel to Europe.”
“After I get the new job, I’ll spend more time with my family.”
“I’ll be happy once this is over”
How often do we put our lives and our happiness on hold for some external condition to become true? Ironically, waiting around for that one thing to work out keeps us from pursuing what we want and enjoying what we’ve got. Mr. McWilliams says it best:
“Recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments.” Peter McWilliams
This is a faulty outlook, let me explain why.
I’ll start with a short personal story.
I’ve been working pretty hard this year to rearrange my life in a way that more accurately expresses who I am and what I believe. Rebuilding it from the ground up hasn’t been easy, and I have a long way to go. Starting this blog was a part of that process. I’ve known for some time that I wanted to run my own business, I like blogging and I thought this was probably the best way for me to share my strengths with other people. That’s all fine and dandy I suppose.
But after the first month of what seemed like relentless reading and writing, I realized something. Even if this blog is the most successful blog on the Internet (an unlikely prospect) and even if I derive great joy from running it and sharing my life and ideas with people (a likely prospect), that won’t make my life happy, balanced, or well rounded.
I was actually operating under the foolish assumption that once my blog was established and running, then I could go ahead and pursue all the other things I wanted in life.
I would think things like:
“Once the blog is set, I’ll start looking for a new girlfriend.”
“After I get the blog going, I’ll start thinking about switching jobs if I need to.”
“Once I have enough money coming in from the blog, I’ll start to travel more.”
“I don’t want to live here, but I can’t move until the blog is done.”
“When I don’t have to spend so much time on the blog, I can start going to the gym another day or two a week”
This was absolute silliness on my part.
Blogs can take years to build and establish. Certainly building a successful blog will take time and sacrifice, no doubt. But, If I throw my entire life into it for the next two years I would probably end up with neither a successful blog, nor a happy and balanced life.
First, by ignoring the other dimensions of my life I would be making too great a sacrifice for the blog. By foolishly thinking the blog was the key to my life and placing everything else on hold, two years could pass, I would have few friends, the same job and no time to travel. Worse still, by neglecting those parts of my life, I think it’s likely I would have rendered myself incapable of producing the kind of quality content that will build a community and help my readers. So at the end of the day, I’d be left with nothing.
But blogging is just one example, people put their lives on hold for lots of things. Here are just a few.
Putting life on hold to build a career
This is an extremely common problem for people who are extremely motivated to do well in their careers. Some folks will work for 50, 60, even 90 hours a week in order to get promotions and move up the corporate ladder. They neglect their family, friends, spirituality and often their health. This is extremely prevalent in western society. I’m not going to suggest that focusing too much on your job is the sole cause of obesity or being overweight, but I will go so far as to say that many people neglect their health because they feel their responsibilities at work already require too much of their time an attention.
That’s an excuse. If your job is so demanding that you have to abuse your body, get a new job. It’s that simple. Sacrificing your health for money just plain isn’t worth it. But that’s not the only problem over-dedicating your time to work can cause.
Marriages often fall apart because one or both partners are too tired to maintain intimacy (not just the physical kind) after a long work week. Children get neglected because our jobs take up too much energy. And sometimes, even our very sense of purpose and passion gets eroded by the slow, relentless monotony of work and responsibility. Our passions become wishes, our wishes dreams, our dreams hopes, and finally hope turns to the surrender of our greatest gift - free will.
If that’s not a recipe for disaster, I don’t know what is.
Take a good honest look at your work-life. How much of your time and energy are you investing in it? What are the results? Are they worth it? Is work a part of your life, an extension of you? Or, does it control your life?
If you didn’t need to work, what would you be doing?
Whatever the answer to that last question is, freaking get going. This moment is the only moment you have. Stop living in the past and future, take control, chase those things down now and bring some balance to your life. It’s your life! What are you going to do with it, work?
Putting life on hold for school
This is a huge problem for some students. Sure, school does take up a lot of your time. I’m not suggesting you should just throw caution to the wind and waste your chance to get educated. However, you can take it too far. If you’re extremely intelligent, getting all ‘A’s might only take you a few hours of studying a week. That wasn’t the case for me. If I wanted an ‘A’ in my difficult courses, I had to work very hard for it. But usually I decided that a simple letter on my transcript wasn’t worth sacrificing so much of my life. I graduated with a 3.2 GPA. I could have gotten a 4.0 if I had surrendered a lot more of my free time. But, at the end of the day all I could do with that number is put it on a resume and say I studied a lot. It just wasn’t worth it to me. In some cases the difference between a ‘B’ and an ‘A’ may have meant I took in less knowledge than I could have. In most cases though, it was simply a function of how much I studied.
You can’t get your life back. Don’t miss out on your twenties because you spent your time swamped with books to read and papers to write. I’m not suggesting you do poorly in school, just keep it in check. There’s more to life than tests, grades and who-knows-why-I’m-taking-this 101. If you need a 4.0 to get into your field or graduate school, that’s one thing. But remember to weigh the costs, don’t put yourself in a position where looking back on your college years you wish you had spent more time investing in other areas of your life.
What about your level of fitness? Do you have a job that will help you gain work experience towards the field of study you’re pursuing? What about an internship? Do you have any sort of moral or spiritual grounding? Are you cultivating new relationships through your contacts at school?
One of my greatest regrets about college is that I didn’t get more involved socially. I let my job, school and my romantic relationships take up all my time. Looking back now I wish I had joined more clubs and gotten to know more people. Learn from my mistake.
Putting life on hold for your partner
It’s one thing to make a sacrifice for someone. It’s all together different to abandon your life for another person. Are you so complete invested in your romantic relationship that you don’t have much of a life outside of it? This is extremely unhealthy, I know because I’ve done it.
It’s good to be dedicated to someone you love, but you’re actually doing a disservice to them if you’re over-investing in them. Placing you partner on a pedestal will put pressure on them to meet too many of your needs, and that may strain the relationship so far that it breaks.
Secondly, if you put too much emphasis on your relationships, you’re likely to neglect the other parts of your life that need attention. Often people become attached to their partner not necessarily because they love them, but because their significant other fills a void in their life. If you do this, you will hit the ground hard, if, or when the relationship comes to an end. In order for a relationship to be healthy, both parties must first become independent. Once this has happened, they can work together and function as a unit with ease.
Though it’s both common and natural to be a bit overzealous in the first months of a new relationship, once the initial spark has died and you’ve stabilized a bit it’s time to get back to your life. It’s ok for your partner to be a part of it, even a big part of it. Just don’t forget that you don’t live for each other, there is more to life.
Putting life on hold because you’re waiting for something
You might not be taking action towards something right now because you’re waiting.
My question is this: What on earth are you waiting for?
People wait for all kinds of things before they are willing to go after their dreams. They wait for the right opportunities, the right time, the right job, the right person, the right sign, etc…
Guess what folks, the right ____ may never come along. It’s your job to create the conditions that will make whatever it is you want possible. Perhaps you can’t create all of those conditions right this instant, but you can be working towards them on a consistent and regular basis.
I stated earlier that I’ve been putting a lot of things on hold for this blog. But, I’m done doing that. So, this week I made some changes. I’ve been thinking for some time now that I wanted to have a more fulfilling job. So, I decided Monday that I needed to think about what kind of job would allow me to express my strengths, passions and beliefs. And I finally feel in life like I have reached a point where I have the clarity to actually pick work that will fit me. I used the “inside out” approach instead of the “outside in”.
Tuesday I was driving to a friends house for dinner when I asked myself the question, “What kind of job would allow me to express the best parts of me and use my talents?” And instantly, as if someone else was inside my head I heard, “personal trainer”. This seemed odd to me because I’ve NEVER considered this job before. I’m in pretty good shape, I work out almost daily and it’s something I enjoy. But, I never considered helping other people get in shape to be something I could, or even would, want to pursue. Still, I’ve learned to listen to that little voice inside, even if I don’t understand it at first.
It’s now less than 5 days later and I’ve talked to a personal trainer about what the job is like, I’ve gotten a trainer for myself to bring my fitness to the next level, and I’ve figured out what to do and how long it will take to get certified. Plus, that research led me to a few other possible careers that I know would be a better fit for me than anything I’ve considered before.
I wanted to explain all of that to you so that you could understand something.
If I had just put it off and decided to wait for the blog to grow I wouldn’t be moving in a direction that would allow me to do fulfilling work nearly as quickly. This blog is fulfilling to me, but it will take many months and years of work. A new job can happen much faster. I would like someday to write for this blog full-time, but in between now and then I need to be sharing my life with people in a way that is meaningful to me and useful to them. And a new job is a way to do that. It could be years before this blog grows enough for me to dedicate a larger portion my time to it. Or, that may never happen. Who knows, I may decide at some point that I don’t want it to.
By taking direct action I’ve put myself on a path that has placed me in greater alignment with my dreams and who I am. You can do the same.
Do what you can, right freaking NOW
You probably won’t be able to have the end result your looking for right this instant. That’s ok. Do everything that you can to make your life what you want it to be right now, in the present.
Do you want to travel but you don’t have someone to go with?
Buy a tent or book a hotel room, make a reservation and get in your car. Go to the places you want to go. See the things you want to see. Use that time for self discovery.
Do you want your office to be more organized?
Plan a four hour block next week where you will clean up your office. In the mean time, buy some books on organization and ask other people how they keep their workspace clean.
Do you want to be a Navy pilot and fly an FA-18 off an aircraft carrier?
Get a pilots license, get your vision tested to see if you have 20/20. Find out what it takes to reach that goal. Decide if joining the military is really right for you. Figure it out now. Not later, now.
Do you want to lose weight?
Educate yourself. Find out what it will take to lose the weight you want to lose. Get a trainer, join a gym, buy some workout clothes. Go to the store and buy the food you need to be eating. Do it now.
Stop waiting around for God to descend from heaven itself and give you his personal blessing. The worst that can happen is you’ll make a few bad decisions and you’ll have to go back and start over. So what, you’ll have learned something.
The present moment
Your entire life will be lived in the present moment. Your past is nothing more than the largely inaccurate, and often insignificant memories you’ve stored in your brain. Your future is nothing more than the potential good and bad events you project upon it. The only moment you will ever live in is this moment. Take hold of the things you want and work towards them now. Not just in one area of your life, but in all areas. At the same time, don’t forget that you are already blessed.
“If you can see, walk, love, and get our of bed each morning, you are rich beyond measure.” - James Arthur Ray
Keep in mind that even a balanced and healthy pursuit of your dreams is only that - a pursuit. Your life can be dedicated to much more than your ambitions. Still, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go after them. Make your goals and aspirations an extension of your life; don’t let your life become a slave to your dreams.
Topics: Courage, General, Goals, Life, Live better |