There are a lot of different ways that someone can consider themselves to be successful. An athlete can train to successfully compete in an event. A student can study to pass an exam. A husband and wife can build a strong marriage. An employee works hard to get a promotion. A person studies their faith seeking deeper spiritual understanding. A financially secure retiree saved for many years to build her nest egg. And, of course, there is nothing to say that you can’t have multiple simultaneous plans. Just don’t spread yourself so thin that you can’t follow any of them through to completion.
While it would be nice to do everything and excel in every aspect of life, the reality is that there are only 168 hours in a week. We have to prioritize the many, many things we could be doing, figure out how much time we want to spend eating, sleeping, commuting to and from work, and working on our chosen priorities. When we run out of hours in the day, we have done all we can do. We may not have gotten to everything, but what we did get done, we accomplished with integrity and excellence.
My top priority is to be the best husband I can be. Someday, I will be a great father. To pay the bills, I work hard at my job, trying to be the employee I would want if I were my boss. And with the remaining time I am a fledgling small business owner (Thank you for visiting our web site!)
This wasn’t always the case. When we got married, we had a lot of debt and had a lot of relationship problems with friends and family. We were so busy doing day-to-day damage control that we didn’t have time to work on our marriage the way we wanted to. I was distracted at my new job, and taking control of our financial future wasn’t even on our radar.
Fortunately, five years ago, we had a loved one who gave us the tools we needed to eliminate our debt. And after we started getting control of our financial lives, we started taking inventory of the toxic people in our lives and reducing their influence. I had distractions in my life that wasted my time and prevented me from being the person I wanted to be. The messes in our lives tend to do that to us. Today, Emily and I are in control.
Accomplishing all this didn’t just happen by itself. We had to put together our plan to eliminate our debt, get control over other people’s influence in our lives. Then we had to execute the plan day in and day out. We could never have done this if our focus was spread too thin by trying to be all things for all people. We had to eliminate the distractions in our lives that could have derailed us from our plan. We could not be everything that other people wanted us to be, and nor should we have to.
When the phrase, “jack of all trades,” first appeared, it described individuals accomplished in many areas of their lives- Renaissance men. When “master of none” came later, the phrase took on the meaning still associated with it today- one who has superficial knowledge of many trades but is not a specialist and cannot excel in any. We want to excel in the most important areas of our lives, and while there may be the occasional modern-day Leonardo da Vinci out there, most of us will do well to pick our important areas and focus out attentions there. We have to make a plan to accomplish our goals and stick to it. The rest will take care of itself.
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