Start Making Better Decisions

With your missions statement, your vision and your goals now more clearly mapped out, the next thing to do is to start following that blueprint to make your goals happen. And this starts by recognizing what will support your goals and what isn’t helping you to get any closer to them. Too many of us work incredibly hard thinking that we’re getting closer to our goals, when actually we’re just moving ourselves further and further away from them. We’re just
procrastinating…

Misguided Strategies

But wait… didn’t we say that you could make your goal anything? Didn’t we say that it was okay to make your goal becoming a movie start? Or becoming a dinosaur? How are you going to make the decisions necessary to make those plans happen? And what if you have responsibilities? Things you need to achieve? What if your kids are relying on you to pay their way through school – can you really just drop everything and go travelling around the world?

Again, this comes down to mindset and I hope I’m about to help you have a few ‘eureka’ moments here. Firstly, recognize that fulfilling your dreams needs to take priority over most other things. That might sound selfish but think about what kind of father/mother your children would rather have: one who is exhausted and unfulfilled, or one who loves what they do and feels excited to go to work every day.

What kind of example are you setting for them by spending your evenings in an office you hate, doing a job you hate, and still not having enough money to live comfortably? The next thing to realize is that you can actually accomplish a lot of things much easier and more quickly once you stop thinking that your life should entirely revolve around your work.

Here’s the irony – a lot of people will work incredibly hard and spend extra hours in the office just so that they can have more time with their family! They dream of being retired and they work so that their family can live
comfortably. If your goal involves spending more time with family, then this is absolute nonsense. All you are accomplishing is actually taking yourself further away from your family and providing for them less.

Your salary is not what dictates your wealth apart from anything else. You can get a raise of 2K a year by working incredibly hard and putting in extra hours, or you could rent the spare room out to students. Or you could sell
trinkets on eBay. Or you could cancel that cable TV subscription and get slower WiFi. You could stop paying for Netflix too.

What would you rather: pay for Netflix and more TV channels and take on hugely more stress at work, or just fix your budget and get more money that way while having more time to spend with family. You could move into
a smaller house and pay less on your mortgage repayments, or you could sell your car and get a smaller, cheaper one.

A lot of people work incredibly hard because they want to ‘save the money to go travelling’. Except, every time they get to that junction when they should just up and go, they realize that they’re doing too well at work and that they can’t leave right now.

So wouldn’t it be better to change and get a job you can do online? Then you could travel while you earned money? Or how about taking a  sabbatical from your current position? Or leaving work, only to find more work when you get back? Why spend your youth working incredibly hard and making yourself ill with stress just to travel when you’re too old to enjoy it? Why not just take long holidays now and live your life?

Why is working harder always the first answer that most of us think of? The answer is that it’s what we’ve been raised to believe by our schools and by the state. It’s not their fault – it is the very central conceit of capitalism that you have to work harder in order to get what you want. And we’ve been taught by others that working hard is the responsible thing to do for our families.

Too bad they’re wrong…

No matter what many people tell you, there is nothing inherently ‘great’ about wasting your life working at a factory, or at a company that sells staplers. You can work incredibly hard and feel like you’re doing your job but at the end of the day, the world would keep ticking on even if you stopped. Meanwhile, your family and your dreams have been put on hold.

Often, the quickest way to achieve our goals is actually to take a pay cut, to move to a poorer part of the world. Often, we will find that we actually have enough money right now to build that dream house, travel the world or look
after our families; if only we’d focus a little less on work. But we keep pushing harder and harder to ‘succeed’ in the traditional sense because we want to be seen to be successful and because that’s what we’ve always been taught to do.

Even if your vision of success is the traditional one and you want to be that CEO, you’re going to need to detach yourself from your current role in order to focus time and effort on your own business. It’s hard to break out of this mindset and this mentality but it is absolutely crucial if you’re going to be successful.

The key here is to stop working blindly hoping things will get better and to instead ask what you actually want and what is really the best way to get it easily. And if that means spending less time at work and maybe raising a
few eyebrows, then you mustn’t be afraid of that!