Why is it that we are constantly putting off the things we want to do most? I can’t work out today because I have to take the kids to practice. I can’t read this book because the dishes have to be done. It’s true, life might be busy and many of us seemingly don’t have the free time, but the necessary stuff seems to get done. We keep kicking the can down the road, however on the things truly make us feel alive.
For many years I was the quintessential travel snob. You know the type.
“I’m not a tourist, I’m a traveller!” That’s right, with two “L”s! “Oh you went to Florida on vacation? That’s cute, I LIVED in Florida and I TRAVELLED to Australia,” I would quip. “I don’t go on tour groups. When you really learn to travel you won’t have to.”
I still don’t go on tour groups.
When I was in graduate school in Hawaii, there was no shortage of ways to embrace nature. It helped that I had a group of friends that was always pushing each other to get out there, go further, and challenge ourselves to do things out of our comfort zone. One of my friends kayaked around the circumference of the entire island of Lanai.
Successful and ambitious people have a huge future problem. They are always living in it. Striving fro the next big goal, promotion, or life achievement can cause us to always be looking ahead.
This moment represents the most time you will ever have left on this Earth.
If that cold hard fact doesn’t freak you out, then you might want to check your pulse. The honest truth is that time is always running out on us. We don’t know whether or not we are going to walk out on the street and get hit by a bus tomorrow. Very comforting.
That is also very inconvenient for us as we need time to become successful, develop relationships, and ultimately end up where we want to be on this Earth. So why then is so much of our focus when it comes to success focused on money instead of time?
Nothing has taught me more about life than my time spent traveling and living in different places. By staying in our routines and continually seeing the same things over and over we become less open to the possibilities that are out there in the world.
If you remember back to high school economics, we learned about imports and exports. When a country was exporting more goods than they were importing, they were probably in pretty good shape. If they were importing more than they were exporting, things could be getting a bit dicier financially. The concept is quite simple and we can apply the same logic when we think about how to change your habits to increase fulfillment.
Letting go of expectations is something that has come up time and again in my career. Ironically, Kansas City has represented a crossroads multiple times in my life.
The first was in 2013. Having freshly finished my thesis, I was ready to enter the workforce. At the time, a federal hiring freeze was ongoing, stymying my job search. My goal, from early in my college education to that moment, was to work for the National Weather Service: an impossibility given the circumstances. Further complicating matters, I was still licking my wounds from a painful, disastrous breakup that shook me to the core a handful of months earlier. The tunnel seemed infinite; there was no light in sight.
Originally written May 16, 2022
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There never seems to ever be enough time to accomplish everything we need to get done. Yet there are activities we do every day that continually waste our most precious resource because we have built them into our routine and they have become habit.
In order to unlock more time in our day, we have to take a hard look at what we are doing and how it plays into our daily balance of activities. For me, time sinks usually fall into to a few major categories. Work inefficiencies, pleasure binging, and boredom.