Stop Every Day

I’ve been spending a lot of time feeling like I’m trying to cover a football field-sized pile of ‘stuff needing to be done’ with a nickel-sized spot of resources every week. Which may sound like it’s not fun, but actually, I get bored without a challenge.

At any rate, all of this leaves me in a fray of tough choices about what to do – and what to never do (and how to go about it). There are all kinds of principles you can use to organize how you think about this stuff, but I take it for granted that you know you can’t do everything – and that you can’t even do everything that seems really important. There simply just isn’t enough time.

It’s a rather well known ‘rule of thumb’ that 20% of what you do generates 80% of your life’s results. Which is a friendly way of saying that up to 80% of what you do doesn’t matter very much at all. A sobering thought to be sure. Your whole life can be taken from you in small chunks by the demands of really ‘important sounding’ things. But you’re not here to have your circumstances make your choices for you. A part of the challenge is that you sometimes face into the storm of demands being placed on you – and you just resist it. Why? Because our obligations are not all there is to us!

So here’s a thought I’ve found really helpful, recently: every day, get up and decide what you’ll give; make it courageous, give it intelligently and with passion, and then surrender the rest. You’ll be surprised how little of the universe actually collapses when you choose to give one person’s worth of ‘stuff’ and then a little bit more.

In so doing, I believe you ‘activate’ a set of outcomes that will move you forward – even if it moves you forward through failure. After all, it’s better to crash your career into the ground for the sake of a life than the other way around. Why? Because as long as you have a life, you can always re-start your career. I don’t know what good a career is, however, without a life.

Jesus asked rather famously, “What good is it if a person gains the whole world but loses their soul?”

Have a great week,

Chris