Create A Life You Want to Live for the Next 10 Years
Life is tricky: we are constantly bombarded with challenges we need to tackle and decisions we need to make. While it is hard to figure out a ruleset for all the diverse challenges we face, I believe it is possible to have useful guidance on our decision making:
Prioritize Your Own Well-Being
We all sometimes feel that others need our energy and commitment more than we need or deserve it ourselves. Your friend in need, a family crisis that needs urgent attention or a local pet-shelter calling for voluntary work to save more dogs.
There even is this teaching within my broader Christian circles which I heard a lot about: the JOY principle; "Love Jesus first, Others second, and Yourself last. That will create true JOY."
Erm, no. Of course there is nothing wrong with service: Stepping up for friends, family or strangers in need, all those are great. But it is all about the ratio. Even Jesus himself told you to "Love your neighbor as yourself." This implies you should love yourself just as much as you love others. Otherwise he would have said to love your neighbor more than yourself. So love yourself too.
Because in the end, you cannot endlessly spend yourself until you are burnt out. Then you will help noone. You need to regenerate too. Only if you know how to regenerate, you will be able to overflow so you can joyously pass on your time and energy.
So for everybody struggling with energy management, start focusing on your own well-being. How do you regenerate? What refreshens you? What sucks energy out of you? Simple questions with tricky answers. But ponder about these on a regular basis, adapt accordingly and your situation will improve in the long run.
Iterate in Small, But Steady Steps
Did you notice all those people building a successful app on a weekend? Or the musician becoming an overnight success? Guess what - it is all bullshit.
What the headlines are not telling you are the years of experience preceding those stories. The successfull app? The developer learnt a ton of skills beforehand, marketing a catchy headline being one of them. The overnight success musician? A whole team of 20 in the music business work on producing, mastering and promoting said music.
It is like those holiday photos you see from your friends: paradise beaches and delightful food. What you do not see are all the arguments they had on their trip, their frustration with the warm weather and their boring everyday life needed to afford the vacation. It was just a highlight reel of a long journey. Nothing comes from nowhere. It all takes time and effort.
In the end that is a sobering realisation. You can steadily learn new skills and add value to your project, your life and your career, and every once in a while you will get to highlight worthy moments too.
Focus on Long-Term Results
And lastly, we have to keep the big picture in mind. Make decisions you can and want to stick to for the next ten years. You want to start writing a blog? Well, writing a post every day will likely not be sustainable. But once every two weeks? Could fit you well.
And even after you made a reasonable decision, like starting to go for a run once a week. Amazing! But now you missed a week or two? Who cares. In the long term, it does not matter. It is far more important to keep going even after failures than to throw in the towel completely.
Chose the steady action, which you can sustain in the long-term. Be the turtle, not the rabbit.
With all that said, I wish you all the best for 2025.