Life is too short not do the things you love to do, and too long to be spending your time doing the things you don’t enjoy.
If I am to leave any message on the day my life comes to an end it is those words I have written at the start of this post. From the journey I have been on through life, every event I have gone through, both the good ones and the bad, this is the most important thing I’ve come to learn.
So what do I mean by it?
Life is too short not do the things we love to do! Every one of us comes to the realisation that one of the most precious commodities we have is time. We all frequently complain we don’t have enough time, or time just seems to fly by. How many of you have sought to find solutions for time management? But what are your intentions when doing so? Normally it is to try and cram as much as you can, getting things done, in the time you have available to you. Yet how many of these things will bring you happiness or fulfilment.
Wanting to get more done with the time you have available to you is always going to be a self-defeating battle. You’ll never be happy no matter how much more you’re able to do. Why? Because most of the things you spend this time doing simply don’t bring you any contentment, they don’t even bring you satisfaction. Often they’re things you feel obliged to do, or necessary to keep others happy.
Yet if you spent your time doing the things you love to do, you can be pretty much certain that you’re going to be far happier and fulfilled. Many of you have spent so much of your life merely surviving, getting done the work you need to do to pay your bills and put food into your families bellies that you don’t any longer know the things you love to do. You’re spending your life doing the things you don’t enjoy at the cost of probably what’s actually important to you.
Don’t aim for success if you want it; just do what you love and believe in, and it will come naturally. David Frost
You have become so accustomed to doing what you have to, not what you love. You work incredibly hard doing a job that often you detest.
I see the talents that I now focus all my working time on as being gifts from on high, the things I was always meant to use, but didn’t learn to use them until late on in my life. Writing and coaching, and speaking are now what I do, and I do them because I love them, and believe I make the difference. It has nothing to do with what I could earn, I see this as being my reward if I provide true value. I have come to realise that it is my talents that make me useful, as well as happy. I also believe the thing you love to do, is where your life’s purpose is found, and together they make you do something meaningful. Combined these things bring you self-fulfilment.
You’re going to miss out on all of this by spending your time doing those things you don’t enjoy. Some see this as necessary self-sacrifice, where they feel they need to do.
Too many of you spend your life labouring and sweating through work you do, clambering for survival but allowing the years to creep by, doing little that gives you joy and living a life that you see has no consequence. What a tragedy!
Nobody should live this way. That is why doing what you love is so important. It changes everything. It will change you.
I know myself that I want my life to really count. And if I can inspire somebody to think the way I do, and do the things I do to make their life count, then at least I have succeeded big time. At the end of my life, I want others to say he lived his life exceptionally well and left this earth with no regrets leaving a legacy that generations after me will not easily forget.
Here is the key point from this post:
Do what you love to do and give it your very best. Whether it’s business or your personal life, if you don’t love what you’re doing then you can’t give it your best, and if you can’t give it your best stop doing it.
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