My one wish for you this year
So I hope you’ve hit the ground running this year. Two weeks in, I hope you’re on top of things with a hot little game plan sitting in your hands.
If not, well, never mind. There’s always next year.
Seems to me there are two ways of moving in life. One is with your own power and your own direction. The other is to let the currents of life wash you where they will.
No prizes for guess which camp I’m in. As they say, only dead fish go with the flow.
(I think it was Ariel in The Little Mermaid).
And so I hope you had a great break. I hope it was rich with family time and rich food. I hope you felt like you pulled the USB cord out of the back of your skull, and got some time unplugged from the great machine.
(Humans go crazy if we don’t on a regular basis.)
But there is one wish in particular I have for you. I hope you had the experience of getting at least one thing totally sorted.
For me, it was the garage. It had become a dumping ground for sports shoes and camping gear and WWII fighter plane parts.
And it had gotten out of control.
Messes have an interesting dynamic like that. No one element of the mess in my garage was particularly troublesome to deal with. Each element was mostly just a case of pick it up and find the right spot for it.
But the total is greater than the sum of its parts. And together, they had become a mess that couldn’t be sorted in just a single lunch break.
If I wanted the satisfaction of an organised garage, I had to put in some serious time.
(Though in the end, it didn’t take me the two days I was expecting. More like 4 or 5 hours. Messes are tricksy like that.)
As much as possible, we should avoid having messes like this in our life. Even if it’s in the garage, but especially with our finances and definitely not in our personal lives.
Messes are heavy. They take up space in your mind – space that could be better allocated with dreams of tomorrow, or visions of 1980s Elle McPherson in the swimsuit calendar shoot. Or you know, whatever.
That is, messes are dead energy. They draw energy from your mind (slowly, almost unnoticeably) and give nothing back in return.
You just don’t need mess in your life. And if you want to achieve great things, you just can’t afford it.
And so I got my garage sorted. I went to town on that mess, and it felt incredibly satisfying. There was a light, almost joyous feeling at the end of it.
So my hope is that you got to experience something similar this break. That you found the joy of getting on top of something.
Christmas is a rare time of the year, where the in-flow of jobs stops. For a brief, sacred time, the mail stops arriving, and we have an opportunity to sort out what we already have on our plate.
And so I hope that you got to feel like you got ahead. Or caught up, at least a little.
And what I want to say is that that feeling – that joy and lightness that comes from having the garage sorted, is possible in all aspects of your life.
In fact, you life in its totality can have the light and joyous feeling that comes with having your shit sorted.
It is possible.
But, my friends, like pretty much everything you’ll ever read in my blogs, you’ll have to work for it.
Having all aspects of your life working like a well-oiled machine takes work. It takes constant care and attention and it takes discipline.
Messes will break out wherever you’re not looking. Mould grows in the shadows.
The first step is being vigilant with what messes you take responsibility for. The garage is totally my responsibility. The argument my mate is having with his wife is not.
(Sure, I can offer care and sympathy, but I have a choice whether I’m going to take it to engagement and intervention.)
Same story with your finances. Are you really in a place to take on another deal, if you don’t feel like the deals you have are totally in hand?
The other key here is to remember that sorted is not the same thing as complete. A deal that is progressing along a well-structured and sequenced plan is ‘sorted’, long before it is complete.
If your messes span time, then put your planning down on paper (or file, or whatever medium it is that is not your head). Release your mind from their constant burden.
And then finally, commit fully, or not at all. Most messes arise from half-arseing. “I could put the golf clubs away, or I could just pop them here next to the mounted machine guns and do it later.”
At all times, be willing to give things the energy they need.
Saving energy in life comes with choosing what we give energy to, not how much energy we give to things.
Give everything 100%, bruh.
Most humans on the planet have just decided to live with mess in their lives, or to just give up completely and go with the flow pumping out of the sewage works.
You don’t have to make that choice. You can choose something else.
This year, it’s up to you.