Guys, you HAVE to read this post by my friend David Cain – it’s so good!! And EXACTLY the stuff we need to be thinking about as we go along our journeys here:
Go Deeper, Not Wider
I don’t often get sucked into articles like this, but wow…. such a great piece on perspective and inspiring change in our lives – or rather, FOCUS in our lives and not changing with every opportunity we get! I imagine it’s a great way to slow down time a helluva lot too.
Here’s the gist of it:
“I keep imagining a tradition I’d like to invent. After you’re established in your career, and you have some neat stuff in your house, you take a whole year in which you don’t start anything new or acquire any new possessions you don’t need. No new hobbies, equipment, games, or books are allowed during this year. Instead, you have to find the value in what you already own or what you’ve already started.”
YES!!!! Appreciating what we have RIGHT NOW and not constantly bringing in more and more “stuff” or jobs or projects or anything else distracting us from just “being” and growing.
What if we did stop and enjoy everything we already have in our lives? What if we didn’t start something new or continue adding in extras all round us just because it’s what we’re used to? How would that make us feel as we go to bed every night? How would that change our finances or dreams?
Such a good thing to stop and marinate on today, and not unlike our own Triad of Hustling concept, and why I ended up FIRE’ing myself from Rockstar Finance the other month…
In fact, had I read this post beforehand I would have saved myself a solid 6 months of struggling and trying to figure stuff out! Haha… Particularly on the whole “starting a new project” thing. You’ll never meet an entrepreneur who’s not chasing a new product or feature or anything else that pops into our brains because EVERY IDEA OF OURS IS AMAZING!! Which of course is the opposite of true, but we’re so addicted to the thrill of the “new” that we end up spreading ourselves way too thin instead of just doing the one thing we should have been doing from the start: focusing.
The same goes with everything we bring into our houses too. How many books are on your bookshelf right now just waiting to be read?? How many new pairs of shoes or shirts or purses are in your closet that you couldn’t live without, yet there they still are with their tags on and all? What if we started consuming everything we owned vs continually bringing home more? I bet it would feel pretty refreshing on top of all the future savings. It would also give you an opportunity to finally part with all those things that are no longer important to you and taking up beloved mental and physical space!
So yeah – highly recommend the post, and really David’s entire blog for that matter: Raptitude.com. He writes about this stuff much more eloquently than me ;) It’s like having your own personal genius in your pockets, where every couple of weeks it pops up to make sure you’re living a more purposeful, and joyful, life, haha… It’s great. And he’s got handfuls of nuggets piled up from over the years too!
I’ll leave you with one more passage that really brings home the article:
“It’s wonderful to have the freedom to continually widen our interests. But like many luxuries, it has an insidious downside. Ever-branching possibilities make it harder for us to explore any given one deeply, because there’s always more “newness” to turn to when the old new thing has reached a difficult or boring part…
We need to find a way to put up our own limits. When we give ourselves fewer places to dig, we go deeper, and what we uncover is more rare and valuable than the usual stuff near the surface.”
I think it might be time for all of us to consider a Depth Year and see what we’ve been missing… Or if that’s too overwhelming, maybe a Depth Month and going from there? Hell – if you can get through the next 5 days without buying or doing something new it might be a win! Haha…
And you know what, that’s exactly where I’m going to start myself :) For the next 5 days – including over the weekend – I promise to not pick up another book or coin or anything else “extra” in my life, and only consume (and appreciate) that which I already own. Which will be quite challenging because I’m ALL ABOUT BOOKS right now and can’t get enough! (And even libraries will be off limits!)
But you can’t enjoy what you have if you’re always picking up more, right? More ≠ more, in this case. Appreciation = more. And we’ve all got a $hit ton to be appreciative of.
Think it over today, and let me know if you’re joining… There’s no way it could hurt!
Via Finance http://www.rssmix.com/
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