Five Questions about Life Choices We Must Ask Ourselves Today
Not all of them rank the same
This article is originally published in Midori by the Sea’s Newsletter. You can subscribe it here.
Talk to any entrepreneur, successful people and craftsman, you will hear them talking about how they work their asses off all the time. Malcolm Gladwell’s book the Outliers also talks about how it takes around 10,000 hours to master our crafts.
But there’s also a contradictory message from society reminding us to strike a work-life balance. Questioning if there’s a point in missing our family life, screwing up our health, just for the sake of working.
It sounds like a tough choice to make. Assuming we are pretty ambitious people, how do we make the right life choices?
Self-limiting choices vs life-expanding choices
People often say ‘life is made of up choices’. It’s true, but not all choices rank equally.
Choosing to do a job that gives you a lot of money but no time for family and ourselves, that’s a self-limiting choice. The smarter choice should be to find a job that gives you enough money but also enough time. The smartest choice is to find a job that rejuvenates you, gives you enough money and time.
A life-expanding choice is often based on knowing how much is enough for us (not for others), and how much with make us thrive.
From there, we need to make smart choices that allow us to do that. For example, evaluating if the current skill set will allow us to find a perfect job. or to do extensive research into how much is enough money and what job should that be.
Of course, some of the choices we made could turn out to be wrong. Here I must remind you to stop blaming yourself. No matter your choices are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, we always need to periodically review and tweak our choices anyways.
There’s always a second chance.
What I’ve learned about choices from failing Dry January
I discovered how toxic my relationship with alcohol was during dry January. I used it to reduce social anxiety, as escapism. But I also realised I love a glass of good wine, it’s a genuine appreciation.
On three occasions, I made a conscious choice that passing the great red wine my friend brought back from France will make me regret it, so I let my Dry Jan fail, drank responsibly and picked up alcohol-free habits again the next day. It is a life-expanding choice because I got to try some premium wine, and I don’t feel guilty about it because I switched to non-alcoholic drinks otherwise, and I’ve learned so much about the alcohol-free industry and myself, that I know me drinking a lot less is not just a January thing, it will be a life-long thing.
If anything, failing dry Jan empowered me to make a choice on taking or passing the alcohol. I become conscious of it, I know how much I need.
Here’s my video about how failing dry Jan taught me how to drink moderately for a lifetime:
Bullshxt choices for bullshxt goals
A self-limiting choice would be to deprive ourselves just because we have some arbitrary goal to achieve. Depriving ourselves is not the same as not indulging ourselves. We should think seriously and make choices that help us to attain the optimal level for everything. The result is that it will give us the maximum amount of pleasure in life.
This is what making smart choices means to never deprive or overindulge ourselves.
Five self-limiting choices to remove today
Everyone unconsciously made these choices. The key is to know what is enough for us. Think in the time scale of a week.
- How much time do you need for rest? This is usually the first thing we give up when we aren’t conscious, the mental health impact is detrimental. Rest means time for ourselves, from cultivating a hobby, exercising to taking a bath. It doesn’t mean time spend partying and taking care of others.
- How much time do you need to care for others? We are the poorest when we chase money so hard that we are exhausted and mentally unavailable for anyone. Make sure you create enough time for that so you don’t look back and find yourself missing out on all the important moments in life.
- How much money do you need to make: If you make money from work you love to do, and have enough time for others and yourself, then that’s the dream. But if you need to do a job that you don’t like, then you must know how much money do you actually need to make, and the corresponding work hours you will put in to make that money. Because every minute you put into doing something you don’t like, it will increase the time you need to rest. Be smart about it.
- How much stress can we take: An appropriate amount of stress is a motivator but over-stressed will screw up our mental and physical health. Plus, everyone has a different level of tolerance, so don’t be fooled by the corporate ladder, the pressure to get promoted is arbitrary if it doesn’t make you happier and freer. The same concept also applies to big life decisions such as marriage, babies, etc.
- Are your choices sustainable? As an advocate of moderation, I am actually not against going to extremes. But this will only work if extreme is where your equilibrium lies. Most people simply don’t reach optimal and sustainable happiness by going crazy (e.g. go from five to zero coffees, suddenly do HIIT training every day, etc.) Taking shortcuts is the most short-sighted thing one can do.
Know your equilibrium
It all goes back to the importance of self-discovery, which is a big focus of this newsletter — check out my first few issues (like this one) that help us know what our goals REALLY are.
If you don’t ask yourselves the above questions, or even draw up a visualisation about your optimal life, then you have no data about yourself at all.
Not having any data about yourself means you are living blindly. The worst-case scenario is you hit a setback and fail to pick yourself up (because you don’t know what you need to do); the mediocre life is when you follow the social norms automatically, this will usually lead to a mid-life crisis.
There are no contradictions between practising our crafts for 10,000 hours and having a work-life balance. If we decide that 10,000 hours is what it takes for us to become good at the thing we care about the most, then we can make the right choice to balance everything around it. By that, let me remind you, our crafts are not always our money-making job, in many cases, we might want to cut back the time we spend on making money so that we can work on the things and people we care about the most.
Know yourself, know your equilibrium; Work smarter, not harder.
Next week provides practical tips to structure our lives based on the revised life choices we have made. Share this newsletter to friends and family who need it!
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