As I get older, and my job and my personal life seem to get more serious, I feel like I’m constantly behind.
Throw in some hobbies, a side-hustle or two, and a writing practice, and I feel like I’m constantly coming up short.
I’ve often heard that life is about sacrifices. To do anything well requires focus.
I think I have a form of anxiety related to FOMO – Fear of Missing Out.
There’s so much I want to do and be good at – salsa dancing, jiujitsu, chess, building a game-changing deep technology startup that helps clean up the planet, Spanish.
Travel the world, father some children, spend time with the friends and family that I love being around. Go to concerts and dance parties. Oh and I still need to do errands, go to the doctor, clear up that issue with customer service, make food and coffee and clean up and shower and laundry.
What can I cut out? What is #1? Some of the most successful people seem to have made their business their one and only – everything else is secondary. Seems miserable.
Warren Buffet says to pick something like 25 things you’d like to do and then circle the top 5 and forget everything else. Let’s try:
My partner
Friends/Family
Health? Seems important
Work
Spending time in nature?
Pretty hard to do.
I guess there is no answer here. It’s just one of those things that’s frustrating and beautiful about life. There is so much good shit out there.
Makes me think of Steve Jobs’ messy desk. It just kept piling on and I’m quite sure he had a lot going on. But he made some pretty cool shit. And he did believe in focus and saying no to the 100 other good ideas that are out there.
I just need to be okay with the proverbial messy desk. And keep a few good priorities. The rest will happen or it won’t.
Looking at the world like Monet yields unbelievable levels of presence and ‘being in the now’.
Think about Monet’s paintings – half of the painting is often the reflection that he sees. I think people mostly don’t notice reflections in glass or mirrors or water. People often don’t pay attention to the way light is dappled or areas of light vs shade.
I’m no artist – but just noticing these things makes me feel completely present. I’m aware of where I am, what’s in the world around me. There’s actually a ton of beauty in those angles on the world, and they’re almost hidden in plain sight.
Keep an eye out for those things and you’ll know you’re in the here and the now.
Not such a cheery title, but it’s true. And thinking about it can help us live a better and more present life.
It’s from Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations“, which is chock full of stoic wisdom.
He says something to the effect of, “The river is flowing. Everything is dying.”
I felt it today getting started on a morning run. Boy were my muscles sore.
I felt it today in the blustery morning, Fall whispering to us, leaves already beginning to drop, foreshadowing the turning of time.
I’m hearing it in a friend who’s stressed about having to care for her aging parent. Soon we may be the parents, and eventually the ones who need care.
We are currently in the Hebrew month of Elul, the month leading into Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur, the holiest days of the year for Jews where we take stock of our lives this past year and set intentions for the coming year.
There are poems that are read on these days in synagogues around the world, framing life as a passing shadow, a disappearing cloud, a fading flower.
It seems morbid, but every time I read something like that or think about it, it instantly makes me present and grateful. I say the ‘river is flowing’ thing every morning as part of a gratitude practice and it works.
Try it. Wake up to your life and the fact that it is ending.
One of the most difficult things about life, especially as its complexity grows, is prioritizing and figuring out what is important in the moment.
Think about that task list and how to assess what’s the most important thing to work on of the thousand other things on the To Do list. Fucking difficult. There’s the Eisenhow Matrix which has been used to illustrate the difference between important, urgent, not important, and not urgent. But it’s just a mental model.
I find this to be especially difficult in balancing the To Do List of your personal life with that of work. Figuring out how to prioritize mental health, relationships, physical health, and the demands of others on your time, are really complicated and it doesn’t seem to stop. Every day this skill gets tested from the moment we awake.
With children this skill seems to become honed even further. The working parent of young children likely has very little time for frivolity. It might even be an interesting exercise to pretend you’re a parent. A lot of productivity advice would tell you to look at your To Do List each day and determine what the most impactful thing to get done that day would be.
In today’s world of instant communication, there are so many more relationships that people maintain than they did 100 years ago. Between texting, email, and social, you can quickly get lost in the unimportant, and worse, fall onto someone else’s timetable. Don’t look at your phone first thing in the morning!
Email, texts, calls are all people inserting themselves onto your To Do List. A successful friend of mine would always say to people who are putting stuff on his To Do List, “Am I on your timetable?”
I absolutely love that. It’s a constant effort to stay on your own time table, figure out what’s important, and prioritize it ruthlessly.