What do you want in life?
Maybe it’s money, or fame, or both. Maybe it’s a bigger house in a better location with nicer things and the picture-perfect family living inside. Maybe you want travel, to see everything there is to see, and do everything there is to do.
Most of us have some idea of what our ideal life would look like, our “dream-life” so to speak. Some of us are living it, some of us are working towards it, some of us try to but get distracted by the minutiae of every day life, and some of us gave up on it completely. The one thing almost none of us do is. ask ourselves if this “dream-life” would actually make us happy.
At some point in our lives, most of us have been convinced that certain things lead to happiness: money, fame, sex, prestige. So we chase those things. We dream about them. We plan our goals around them. We center our lives around them.
But will they really make us happy?
Let’s dig a little deeper.
What did you say when I asked you want you want in life?
How much of it was based around accomplishments, purchases, or one-time events?
Most of us answer the question of what we want out of life with a laundry list of things. We want promotions. We want money. We want love. We want kids. We want cars. We want houses. We want better bodies. We want once-in-a-lifetime vacations. You get the idea.
Notice what all of those things have in common.
They focus on what we have, not what we do.
It’s almost as if we’re literally painting a picture of what we wish our lives looked like, and we try to cram as much on the canvas as we can, as if our entire lives will exist within the four corners of that sheet. We base these pictures on the idea of permanence. We have this notion that some day our life will become a constant. We convince ourselves that once we buy this or have that things will fall into place and stay there. But life never stops. Things may fall into place for a short while, but they won’t stay there forever.
We want the perfect families, with the starting point guards on the basketball team or the lead roll in the musical, but forget that one day they’ll graduate, move out, and start lives of their own.
We want the prestigious jobs, but we forget that one day we’ll retire and that title will merely be a shadow of our past.
We want the perfect body, but forget that one day we’ll be old, wrinkled and graying.
We want the fame, but forget that one day we’ll be forgotten, a relic of the past.
We base base the picture of our life on still-frames of fleeting moments. On single snapshots in an ever-changing life.
This is wrong.
Life’s not a picture.
It’s constantly changing as the soldiers of time march onward.
No matter who we are, no matter where we live, no matter how much money we have, and no matter how old we are, we all have the same 24 hours every day. The same 1440 minutes. The same 86400 seconds.
The secret is finding the right way to spend that time, a way that makes us happy, content, and fulfilled. And even if we don’t, we still have to do something with that time each and every day until the day we die.
We need to stop asking ourselves what we want in life, and start asking ourselves how we want to spend our time.
Pretend for a moment that you have all the money you could imagine, that you’ve purchased everything you could possibly dream of, that you already have everything you said you wanted in life just moments ago.
What do you do now?
How do you spend your days?
Some of us would start by describing an exotic lifestyle. We would travel the world in private jets, drive around in sports cars, and party on mega yachts.
But would we really want that forever?
We’ve all been to a party that lasted a couple hours too long or a vacation that lasted a couple of days too long.
The truth is that most of us crave some kind of routine. Something we can do day in and day out. Something that we enjoy. Something that satisfies us.
This doesn’t mean we should never travel or party or do exciting things. Travel is a great way to experience new cultures and ways of life, and parties are an exciting way to reconnect with old friends or to make new ones, but most of us past the age of 22 would get tired of both pretty quickly if they were all we did.
We need something else.
Something real.
Here’s another example.
What’s your dream car?
Maybe a Corvette? A Bugatti? A Lamborghini?
Suppose you were given that car right now.
You’d be ecstatic, right?
You’d probably take the car out for a spin immediately. Maybe you’d post a couple of
Instagram stories of it or text pictures of it to some of friends.
Fast-forward five years.
It’s a normal day. You’re driving to the grocery store to pick up food for the week.
Are you actually any happier in your Lamborghini?
Does it make your errand trip any better than if you were driving a Toyota Camri?
Sure you might get a few envious looks from people, but by now you’re used to that. Someone in the parking lot might compliment your ride, but you’ve heard it a thousand times. Be honest. Is your life that much better? Is it better enough to justify the cost?
Here’s the thing about stuff, it’s meant to be used, not shown off. Sure the attention of buying a nice car might make us feel good at first, but eventually the hype where’s off, and what we’re left with is a vehicle that takes us from point A to point B, same as any other car.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t want nice things. In fact, up to a certain point “nice” is worth it. No one wants a car that breaks down every thousand miles, or a house that can barely stand upright. The important factor isn’t the cost, it’s the reasoning.
We need to think of our purchases in terms of the added value they’ll bring to our day-to-day lives and the way we spend our time, and forget about the bragging rights.
I have a friend from high-school who comes from a lot of money.
They have a lake house in Michigan, with an expensive boat on the dock.
And you know what?
They use the hell out of the lake house and the boat.
They spend most of their summer each year enjoying life on the lake, and they take the boat out almost every day.
That’s money well spent.
The amount of value they get out of the house and the boat far surpasses the price they paid.
Why? Because it gives them a different way to spend their time. A way that makes them happy.
Stop asking yourself what you want to have in your life, and start asking what you want to do with your time. In the end, that’s really all that matters.
But how do you go about doing this? It’s actually pretty simple. Plan your goals around how you want to spend your time, not around what you want to have. Constantly ask yourself, what would a perfect day in your 30’s look like? What about your 40s? 50s? 60s? What about next year? What about tomorrow?
What would the perfect day look like for you?
Not a vacation day, or a spa day, or a holiday, just an ordinary day.
A day you could live time and time again for the rest of your life.
What activities do you do? Do you work? What kind of work do you do? Do you spend your evenings with a significant other? With kids? Alone?
Here’s mine:
I wake up early and meditate to prepare myself for the day ahead. Then I make myself a pot of coffee and just sit back and enjoy it, maybe with a girlfriend or wife or an entire family depending how far out in the future we are. I pour myself a second cup of coffee and write for a while. When I’m done, I shower and head off to work, to a job where I actually make a difference, where my work has a real impact on people. After work I get active for a bit, maybe by going for a run, maybe by practicing yoga, maybe by lifting weights, or maybe I mix it up every day of the week. Once I’m done, I head home and spend an hour learning something new, maybe a skill for work, maybe a new language, or maybe an instrument, whatever I feel like at the moment. Afterwards, I cook dinner and then eat it with my family. After dinner I take a bit of free time to do whatever; watch TV, play a game, talk, drink, whatever. Finally I head to bed, where I read till my eyes feel heavy and then turn off the lights, content with the day and ready to do it all again tomorrow.
Two unique things happen when we plan our lives around how we want to spend our time.
The first is it completely changes how we evaluate the things we think we want. It simplifies things. All of a sudden we base our purchases and prospective accomplishments around how they effect our day-to-day life, not what we’ve been trained to think we think we should want.
The second is it gives us the ability to start making changes right now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Not next year. Not once we get a promotion. Not once we retire. Now.
Look at my “perfect day,” I can do a lot of that stuff immediately.
I can meditate every morning.
I might not have a girlfriend, a wife, or kids just yet but I can definitely sit back and enjoy a cup of coffee by myself.
I can write every morning.
I might not be making as big of a difference with my work as I want to, but I enjoy the work that I do, and I can start working towards finding a more impactful position.
I can get active for a short while after work every day. I can take an hour every day to learn something new.
I can cook.
I can read.
None of it is that complicated.
Once we’ve envisioned what we think would be the perfect day, we can start to test it out.
What do we actually like doing? What did we think we would like, but actually hated?
We can start to tweak our days to match our dream, or tweak our dream to match what we actually enjoy doing, and we can start working towards the things on our list that we might not be able to do right away due to money or circumstances.
So how will you spend your time?