The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.
Mark Twain
According to the dictionary, life is the condition that allows the existence of an individual being. According to your writer, life is a priceless opportunity to fulfill our existence.
Most of us enjoy the privilege of deciding what, when and how to navigate our bestowed living condition. Life offers a cornucopia of subjects for us to choose from. You want to feed your family, become a designer, build muscles, fight the cartel; that’s all great but how do you decide what to do first?
Well, that’s an art. I shall summarize the art of defining priorities in life using three scanty words: awakening, decision and action.
Defining priorities will ultimately help make sense of your life, to find your own answer about why you are here.
To be clear, this is not about having goals. Priorities are the things you do that matter the most in your life that you sustain in the long-term. Goals can help you achieve certain states to satisfy your priorities during a given time. For example, one of your priorities can be to stay healthy, while one goal can be to follow a 30-day diet.
Early Bird Gets The Worm
Nowadays, it seems that life’s priorities are consigned to oblivion. We walk through our days in a self-induced coma, performing our duties while on auto-pilot.
That’s not necessarily wrong, in my opinion. It’s normal, it’s part of our nature. This auto-pilot condition, however, spirals frantically out of control at some point.
I won’t dare to explore the circumstances that lead us to behave in such a manner, but I will try my best to illustrate the benefits of waking up from this condition.
We can profit from a significant advantage by questioning why we do the things we do. It’s the first step to waking up early and catching that juicy worm of a fulfilled life.
A great and simple exercise for waking up is these five stupid questions that will shock your life. What’s the purpose of studying? Why do I need to do that? Why do I work? Is this what I really want to do for the rest of my life?
Change starts with awakening. Essentially, it’s awareness – a form of liberation. That’s the moment when one can change from constantly thinking about doing something to caring about something and just effing doing it!
“We have two lives, and the second one beings when we realize we only have one.”
Confucius
The best moment to perform this exercise is not tomorrow; it is now. What is more important than living your life rightfully? Your second life can start by defining your priorities today, not tomorrow.
To be practical, we will benefit not just from eating worms but also:
- Making sense of life: add value to every little action you perform. From serving a coffee to your significant other to building wealth with a purpose.
- Designing the environment that leads to finding your own purpose in life: this is a profound topic, but at a basic level, designing the direction of your life will increase the odds of finding answers to what you should be doing rather than by following others’ opinions.
- Simplifying decision-making: difficult decisions can become trivial. When moments of decision arise, we can map them to our priorities and if they are aligned it becomes easier to avoid regretting decisions.
- Rejecting temptations: it becomes easy to say no to events, invitations, anything that is not aligned to your priorities. Would you like to come here and smoke five packs with me? Sorry, my health and my family are a priority; I want to be alive to witness my daughter’s prom.
Act – Become Your Priority
The first decision to make is to quit the auto-pilot program running your life at this moment. The second act requires figuring out what matters the most to you that deserves to be called a priority. It requires a thorough understanding of yourself.
It may be tricky because most of us do not know ourselves as much as we claim. It’s ok if you don’t fully know yourself yet. I have news for you: one can spend a lifetime without even knowing who we are.
Ancient wisdom offers timeless approaches to knowing ourselves deeply. My favorite is traveling the journey of becoming. Who you want to become unveils who you are.
In my practice I have found that the following exercise helps build the identity you want to pursue. Ask yourself: how do I want to be remembered after I die? To be more dramatic (and realistic), imagine what your tombstone would say:
💀 RIP
Loving father, supporting husband, skillful astronaut.
With your gravestone outlook in mind, let’s break down the priorities.
Circles Of Life
Have you ever peeled an onion? You can pull layer after layer until you reach the center of this vegetable. One good strategy to organize priorities simulates this concept. Each layer hosts a set of rich nutrients (priorities) that collaborate to form a meaningful living organism.
This simple triple-layer technique will set you up with a good start to define priorities in your life. It won’t enlighten the truth about yourself but it creates the conditions to navigate through life according to your terms.
You can add more layers if it seems more practical to you but limiting it to three forces you to think of what’s essential.
1. Individual
Spoiler alert: your top priority in life must be you.
Mental health, fitness, wealth. If you don’t agree with putting yourself at the center of the onion, quit this article and move on. This can horrify some people, I know. How can this egomaniac not make his family top priority?
I ask back, how can we expect to help others when we can’t help ourselves? This approach aims to build a solid foundation on you as an individual in order to help others. A series of concentric circles that starts from you towards others including your family and friends.
What needs to happen to allow you to live in harmony? Working out? Changing your job? Learning about investing?
2. Nuclear Family
In the second layer, you prioritize what you need to do so the people around you can thrive; in other words, it could mean fostering your economy if you live as a citizen.
It can also mean education for children, savings for college, retirement plans, health care, and so forth. Think of those things that need to be taken care of that allow our loved ones to succeed and thrive.
3. Skin
The last layer of the onion is the façade of your life – what you project, how you and others perceive your existence. The priorities in the first two layers aim to help you become that someone you envision. Keeping that outlook in mind, what needs to happen so you become a skillful astronaut?
It’s time to carefully think about what drives you, what makes you jump out of bed in the morning with excitement, what adds more value to your life.
What would life look like without something or someone important (or maybe not so important after all) in your life? These answers will give you hints of the elements you can allocate in the third layer of your onion.
What does your circle of life look like? If this is helpful, by now you can discern how you want to navigate through life. There could be hindrances along the way. The most common is time; there are many things we want to do, but the time to do them has to come from somewhere.
Luckily, in this case, I have covered a few articles on the topic. The day you start having time can help. For the rest, I’ll be happy to keep cataloging them and providing my insights. You know where to find me 🙌🏼