What Is Your Ideal Lifestyle?

As the new year is officially under way I am reminded of a something a close friend of mine said to me, "Most people make a living instead of designing their lives?" While I am not a big fan or advocate of New Year's Resolutions, I do like to contemplate the year that just passed and consider what, if anything, I want to do differently in the year ahead. With that in mind, Who is it important for you to design your ideal life for?

The key is not to prioritize your schedule, but to schedule your priorities. A book that I read some time ago shared this story to make the point.

I attended a seminar once where the instructor was lecturing on time. At one point, he said, "Okay, it's time for a quiz." He reached under the table and pulled out a wide-mouth gallon jar. He set it on the table next to a platter with some fist-sized rocks on it. "How many of these rocks do you think we can get in the jar?" he asked.

After we made our guess, he said, "Okay, let's find out." He set one rock in the jar, then another, and another. I don't remember how many rocks he got in, but he got the jar full. Then he asked, "Is that jar full?" Everybody looked at the rocks and said, "Yes."

Then he said, "Ahhh." He reached under the table and pulled out a bucket of gravel. Then he dumped some gravel in and shook the jar and the gravel went in all the little spaces left by the big rocks. Then he grinned and said once more, "Is the jar full?" By this time we were on to him. "Probably not," we said.

"Good," he replied. And he reached under the table and brought out a bucket of sand. He started dumping the sand in and it went in all the little spaces left by the rocks and the gravel. Once more he looked at us and said, "Is the jar full?" "No!" we all roared.

He said, "Good!" and he grabbed a pitcher of water and began to pour it in. He got something like a quart of water in that jar. Then he said, "Well, what's the point?" Somebody said, "Well, there are gaps, and if you really work at it, you can always fit for more into your life.

"No" he said, "that's not the point. The point is this: If you hadn't put these big rocks in first, would you ever have gotten any of them in?"

That story impacts me each and every time I hear it because it is so applicable to what each of us is doing with our time everyday. We're always trying to fit more activities into the time we have. But what does it matter how much we do if what we're doing isn't what matters most? The big rocks represent what matters most to each of us. Are you scheduling time into your day, week, month, quarter, and year, for the things that matter most to you?

The most powerful influence in your life is what you say to yourself, THAT YOU BELIEVE! Goals are neither right or wrong. They simply get us to take action (or not). So whether you believe in making New Year's Resolutions or not, I challenge you to answer these two questions for yourself;

1) Who is it important for you to design your ideal life for? and

2) What is YOUR Ideal Lifestyle?

If you take just a few minutes and answer these two questions you may very well set yourself on a path and progress toward what you defined as important to you and those you care about. For far too many people, life is "Groundhog Day" and it's high time we snap out of it. As Albert Einstein is credited with saying, "If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got!"