Sometimes it’s useful to look at things from a different angle. We each get the same 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year to spend however we choose. What is the best use of these hours, days and months? What do we want to pour our life into?
The trick with our time is that we will spend these hours on something. So making no choice still results in a choice – even if we sit around doing nothing. We could spend a majority of our time playing golf, or going to work, or working at a hobby.
What is really worth pouring our life into? What will give us deep satisfaction, and a sense that we lived well and left the world a better place?
Here are some choices we can make:
1. We can spend our life on leisure.
We can watch lots of TV, spend a lot of time looking at the Internet, take lots of trips, and drink lots of beer. If we spend a majority of our life on this, we’re not impacting the world much. It would be hard to say that we left the world a better place.
2. We can spend our life on work.
Depending on our work, this could be pretty good, or not so good. If we’re flipping burgers for work, I think this has a pretty low impact on the world. If at work we’re creating medical equipment for heart resuscitation that can save people’s lives, this is meaningful work. For most of us, we have a hard time seeing how our work really makes a meaningful impact.
In particular, if the things we really care about are disconnected from our work, then the work won’t matter to us. We’ll end up in the land of burn out and feel beat up.
3. We can spend our life on family.
This seems to be a big one for people. We hear a lot of, “I don’t want to make a meaningful impact in the world. I want to be with my family.” – as if they are forced to pick between the two. I certainly don’t want anyone to neglect their family. Yet, pouring our life primarily into family seems narrow to me. If everyone does this, then we have a scenario where I pour into my kids who pour into their who pour into theirs, etc. We become “in grown” as we focus only on our family, and nothing escapes out from the family tree and affects the rest of the world.
I believe we have a deep yearning for our life to matter to people beyond our family. What if we wanted to raise our kids to be a positive influence on the world? How would we model this for them if we were focused on them to the exclusion of others?
4. We can spend our life on random acts
We see this a lot too. People spending their life on an abundance of charitable organizations. These folks are involved in Thanksgiving baskets, homeless soup kitchens, Christmas angel trees, service projects and more. This is the shotgun style – do as much of everything good that we can and hope something lasting comes of it.
If we lived this way, at the end of our life, we would be hard pressed to name one lasting impact that we made. It would all be theoretical.
5. We can spend our life on purpose
We hope this is the one you chose. In this case, we find what we deeply care about. We discover what on earth we are here for. We’ve selected the one thing about the world that we can’t stand and we’re willing to do something about it. Then we get real focused on this one thing. We spend hours, days, months, and years getting really good in this one area. We gain a deep understanding of all the dynamics surrounding our area of impact as we become experts.
With this approach, we will see lots of amazing results from our efforts. And at the end of our life we won’t be wondering if our life mattered and if all our activity made a difference.
Instead we’ll know.
