Many people like to express their wealth in space—by buying large houses with gigantic rooms on huge plots of land.
But space without time is wasteful.
Real wealth is expressed in time—by having freedom over your calendar to spend large chunks of time doing as you please (in the space you’ve afforded).
Before you buy space… and negatively effect your available time (larger overhead, more maintenance, excessive fees, etc)… maybe you should find ways to buy for time instead.
A change in my life caused me to stop reading before bed.
And before bed was my time to read… established into my lifestyle for years.
But, I simply couldn’t do it with this new life change…
So I’m training myself to become an afternoon reader.
I’m cutting as much afternoon social media time as I can—at mostly zero as of late—and am replacing it with 20-40 minutes of reading time. Outdoors, too, when it’s nice enough outside.
It has taken me a couple of months to get to this point, but I can feel it starting to take hold.
Today’s reminder is to be diligent about making time and space for the things that are important to you in your life.
Life will always challenge you with distractions and by shuffling up priorities.
It’s up to you to keep everything straight in your mind and matched appropriately with the amount of energy and effort you put in.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
But, at the same time, if it can break, don’t forget to maintain it.
Too many of us live reactively in the world. Running from one broken situation to the next, exhausted and frustrated. Possibly because ain’t nothing wrong with any of it until of course… something is…
But, if we spent a little more time living proactively… and walking mindfully in our houses, businesses, and amongst our belongings and relationships… looking for things that are vulnerable, weak, or susceptible to getting damaged or broken… we might be able to prevent so many more “brokens” in our life.
Because here’s the thing: just because it ain’t broke, doesn’t mean we should ignore it.
When in fact, a little maintenance is precisely how we keep things from ever getting broken in the first place.
When we exercise our body to fatigue, it takes less to get back to that point of fatigue if we do another set of the same exercise within a close enough timespan.
And even after we’re done with our workout, it can take anywhere between 24 – 72 hours before our body is fully recovered… which means we’re in a prolonged state of it requiring less to get us back to that point of fatigue.
This is how it is for mental fatigue as well.
If we push our minds to a point of complete mental fatigue, it’ll require less to get back to that point for at least a day thereafter. And the closer in proximity we are to that initial point of complete fatigue, the easier it’ll be to become re-fatigued.
The reason this is important to understand is because in life… we’re constantly getting hit with mentally fatiguing tasks, challenges, and experiences.
And if we’re not mindful of where we are on this Fatigue Threshold Spectrum… then we might not act in alignment with what our mind needs to perform optimally and most efficiently.
Just like the muscle group that we fatigued needs 24 – 72 hours of rest to fully recover… so, too, do the mental muscles we flexed to similar points. And if we don’t follow this protocol, then we’ll just hit fatigue quicker, using muscles that aren’t fully recovered, and only prolong our full recovery out further.
So either a) get in the habit of stopping at your 70% fatigue level so you can recover quicker or b) find ways you can give yourself more time to get back towards 0 after pushing yourself to 100%.
The more tired I am, the more easily I’m sucked into distraction.
The more easily I’m sucked into distraction, the more tired I get.
At some point, the cycle needs to be broken.
The cycle can be broken by getting more sleep (which makes it easier to avoid/resist distraction and then again get more sleep) or by further removing distraction (which makes it easier to get more sleep and then again further remove more distraction).
The problem is that most people have a really hard time making this up front investment.
They get to the end of their day and don’t want to go to bed early (because they just want to ‘relax and unwind’) so they allow for unnecessary and excessive distraction.
Or while they’re staring at the priority workload they have to complete, they succumb to the distractions instead because it’s easier and more pleasant to get a couple quick dopamine hits than trying to complete a daunting work load.
But once you make that initial upfront investment and deliberately make choices that lead to more sleep or allow you to focus on the priority tasks over the cheap dopamine hits… and the cycle is actually broken… what begins anew is a fresh cycle… an upward spiring cycle… one where more sleep leads to more willpower over distraction and/or less distraction leads to less struggle with sleep.
And THAT is where the real pleasure in life is found.
Inner Work Prompt: How can you break the tired and distracted cycle in your life?
P.s. ICYMI you can read the best of what I posted to MoveMe Quotes last week here.
Today, one of my best friends went through one of the hardest days of his life.
In the thick of it, he got devastating news about his dog and was confronted with a choice…
He could either do a 17k surgery or put his dog down… the same choice I had to face with my Stella.
It was an emotional call to say the least, but as we talked about it on the phone the two things I offered him was (1) call and speak to the people we know who have been through it and listen to their advice and (2) take a walk.
The first piece felt obvious since we had a few friends in common who have lived this experience and there’s nobody better qualified to answer an impossible question than the people who have had to make it before.
The second piece of advice felt less obvious but worth mentioning because it’s what really helped me when I was going through it. Sometimes when we sit stagnantly in our sorrow, it turns into a toxic stew that clouds our judgement and poisons our physiology.
Moving our body is a highly underrated way to flush the highly potent emotions that come with sorrow and grief so as to keep our thinking moving and problem solving ideas fresh.
It’s a strategy that helps with the impossible decisions and everyday problems alike. And if you can get into the habit of walking more regularly… you just might find yourself working your way through your problems more regularly as well.
This past weekend was busy for me.
I travelled to Pittsburgh, PA, USA for a martial arts tournament which involved planning, packing, driving, dining, coaching, judging, coordinating, problem-solving, facilitating, calming, communicating, motivating, entertaining, and of course… sleeping.
See both Friday and Saturday night… by the time I got to my Airbnb after a day involving everything mentioned above… I was exhausted.
And in both cases, I thought about my daily writing practice… and how I still needed to get something published in order to keep my schedule.
And in both cases, after some quick and calm reflection (while I laid in the Airbnb bed)… I realized that in that moment—sleep was the higher priority.
…Which is worth mentioning because this is not something I have always prioritized this way.
In previous times, the daily writing piece was prioritized higher over sleeping… and I would push myself to stay up late… sacrifice precious (and limited) sleep time… and essentially borrow exponentially into tomorrow compared to what I was putting in… affecting my entire following day.
For some crazy reason… society considers sleep a very low priority… and I FELT it for a long time. I’m slowly starting to unlearn this idea and give myself more grace when it comes to being exhausted after a long day—even when that means a daily 1-minute article will be missed.
Because you know what?
Sleep IS the higher priority over 1-minute articles… and for most other things we backwardly choose to do in its place for that matter…
My question for you is… what thing(s) have you backwardly been prioritizing that you need to unlearn?