Philip Harman With your mission 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.
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.
