How to live an extraordinary life
You can decide to change your life right now
Often when you think about how your life looks right now there are things that could be improved. Things that could clearly be better. You could change your life now but you leave it to your future self to figure out. After all, there is plenty of time right?
What if, instead of leaving your future self with all of the work, you change your life now and enjoy the benefits for longer? To me this seems like a great deal. Sure, there will always be improvements to make, but pursuing better means living a better life.
The willingness to wait to improve is definitely common during early careers. In her book ‘The Defining Decade’, Meg Jay discusses why your 20’s matter and that by making the most of them, you open the opportunities that come down the line. Although her book specifically targets a particular age group, I think it applies to everyone. We should make the most of our time right now, and not save our improvements for later down the line. She discusses the concept of identity capital, that is what we as individuals bring to the table, our skill set. Whether you are in your 20’s, like me, or are older, considering what makes up your identity capital is important. There are differing questions you should ask about identity capital depending on which stage of your career you are at:
Early on in your career – what opportunities will expose me to the most new experiences, environments and skills?
Experienced in your career – how can I maximise the skills that make up my identity capital?
Whether you are seeking exposure to new areas, or focusing on maximising your strengths, it’s good to get a sense of which parts of your life you are pursuing better.
The wheel of life
Life coach, Tony Robbins suggests that people are too busy chasing money instead of designing their life. If you can design what your life ideally looks like, setting yourself on the way to get there will improve your career, your environment and lead to surrounding yourself with people who also are in pursuit of better. Tony Robbins’ wheel of life is an assessment that helps you identify your current position against your desired position. Doing the assessment will help your gaps in the areas of:
Health and vitality
Mind and meaning
Love and relationships
Productivity and performance
Career and business
Wealth and lifestyle
Leadership and impact.
Knowing where your biggest gaps are will enable you to focus on finding the resources to help you get where you want to be. At the end of the assessment a course is suggested for you and sometimes these can be expensive; this can be enough to put some people off. I would suggest there isn’t much you cannot figure out by reading on a topic, or listening a podcast.
I used the wheel of life to consider what books I should buy, or who I should seek to listen to in pursuit of closing the gap between where I am at and where I want to be. There doesn’t have to be a big financial cost to figure it out. It will however require a time investment, but one which is totally worth it. If you are looking for book/podcast/video recommendations on where to begin feel free to begin a discussion in the comments.
Prioritizing what matters
Being in pursuit of better means prioritising the things that matter, and removing the trivial from your life. We spend large amounts of time on trivial things, because they are popular or due to fear of missing out.
In his book ‘Essentialism: the disciplined pursuit of less’, Greg McKeown outlines essentialism as a concept to purely focus on the right things, at the right time and for the right reasons. Fear of missing out, or doing something because it has always been done that way shouldn’t be a thing. If you prioritise the trivial you will struggle to get to your desired position on the wheel of life. It’s similar to the jar of life analogy, where if you fit the things that don’t matter in the jar first, there isn’t any room left for the most important things. Pursuing better is not an undisciplined pursuit of everything, but the choice to go after the things that really matter to you, to get to where you want to be in the important things.
This extends to our use of technology. Technology consumes our lives in a way that was never anticipated when the internet first started. We fill our time by scrolling through social media, or playing games, and replacing social interactions with virtual interactions. We are wired for human connection, and in ‘Digital Minimalism’, Cal Newport highlights a path back to living in the real world. He proposes a ‘digital declutter’ which involves limiting your time using technology for 30 days. It is the reintroduction of the technology though, that the ‘better’ piece comes from. It provides the opportunity to rebuild your technology use from scratch. By using technology in a more intentional way, Newport suggests that you will remove a lot of the wasted time which could instead be used for something more meaningful.
The want for constant growth is natural. The application to go ahead and do it, and do so in the right areas is less common. For me the pursuit of better is an amalgamation of narrowing down to the things that matter, and searching for resources to help me figure out the answer. It is a choice to change your life and you have the choice on when you start that journey.