Summary
With your sights focused on building a successful and independent future, it can be very easy to put off living in the here and now. Fun and relaxation might seem like something you are working toward in the distant future, not a concern you have time for right now. But the truth is that tomorrow is guaranteed for nobody.
Life doesn’t need to be such a slog. The reason to achieve success is to be able to enjoy it and to build happier lives for your family and friends as well. Vacations, time out to recharge, hobbies – all of these will not only keep you sane and balanced, but will very likely be rejuvenating enough to make your work a greater success as well.
Read on for some more tips on how to set boundaries between the personal and professional – and ensure that you are wringing the greatest enjoyment out of your life journey.
Transcript
It takes time to build a dream. But you need to take the time to live it too.
An entrepreneur almost inherently has to be living in the future. With your focus fixed on a vision for the future, you can fall into the risk of never really living in the present to enjoy the fruits of what you are working toward. The credo “live for today” won’t necessarily work in every instance – living like there’s no tomorrow would ensure little progress in building a business or achieving financial independence. But you must also take time out for fun and appreciation or risk burning out on your goals.
It’s a common dilemma for all of us struggling to strike the right balance between work and personal life, especially as it comes to raising families. You have no shortage of company in this ongoing struggle.
Set Your Priorities
It may seem counterintuitive to mention to-do lists or prioritizing in the context of living a fun life, but learning how to focus on a few key priorities – and minimizing needless burdens on your time – will help ensure that you have more time for building memories.
Establish Boundaries
You need to be setting boundaries on your time because the amount of tasks requesting your attention will only increase as you continue to develop in your career or grow your business ventures. Especially when you are working for yourself, you need to know how to work in “dead stop” times in which you close up work and recharge. It might help to establish some routines or cues that send your brain the signal that it is now time to put your feet up and relax. This might be making yourself a drink, throwing on some music, or kicking back with the newspaper. This cue should set off a switch in your brain that lets you know that it is okay to take some time to recalibrate now. It might be hard to entirely disengage and remove your thoughts from work, but it is worth the effort!
Recharge Is Essential
This is crucial not just for maximizing your fun, but for getting the best work possible out of you. Burning out and exhaustion do not make for good strategies for creative or innovative thinking. Artists often point to the ways in which they make new connections and insights that they apply to their work from time “off”. For example, you might notice how you finally come up with a solution to that marketing challenge that has been vexing you when you leave the office – the answer just seems to come to you while on a beach or in the shower. The distinction is that you are relaxed and your brain is more open to new ideas coming in than you might be receptive to during the rigidity of normal work hours.
Love What You Do
As you progress through life, you’ll likely have no shortage of reminders that life is precious – and finite. We all learn that tomorrow is guaranteed to nobody. This is part of what makes planning in life so difficult, of course – it would be much easier to plan for the future if you knew in advance how much time you have! As we are all working from imperfect information about what the future has in store, it is especially crucial to ensure that you are not just living to work, but building a life that brings you happiness.
An easy way to get there is to do work you are engaged in and care about. There’s no such thing as an absolutely optimal business or work environment, but it surely does not need to be a miserable experience in the way that many people seem to experience the world of work. Of course, working toward financial independence and working for yourself will do a world of good in helping you to forge a work environment you have control over, in which you can do the type of work that you want to do at the rate at which you want to work. Some of the luckiest people in the world are those who enjoy their work so much that they see it as a calling, one that they don’t even necessarily need to escape from.
Warren Buffet describes his daily routine as “tap-dancing to work”, continuing to put in hours studying investments long after he could be delegating more of his duties and sunning himself somewhere. If you can arrive at the same point of finding the work you do as its own intrinsic reward, you will be able to maintain a steady state of satisfaction.
It may be correct that nobody wishes they spent more time at the office on their deathbed, but they may well have wished that they made the best use of their gifts while they were alive. This is the distinction between using your talents and shuffling around from meaningless meeting to meeting. Maximize your time to focus on what you really love to do – and spend the rest of that time on your passions and personal relationships. These will be what you likely have in mind when looking at the big picture of it all.
Do What You Love
Have the confidence to know what your idea of fun is. Many people find themselves taking part in activities just because they think they should, even if they do not actually provide them with any authentic pleasure. Not everyone necessarily enjoys a passive activity like watching sports or laying around on a beach. Not everyone enjoys intense exercise hobbies, like competing in marathons or going to spinning classes. Find the type of fun that works for you – it may even be something that others would write off as work. Think of yard work or fixing up your car or cooking. What some people see as chores and wastes of time can be rejuvenating for others. It’s all a matter of perspective.
Even our notions of retirement probably could stand to be reexamined a bit. So many of us continue to look at the retirement phase of life as a Holy Grail period in which we will finally be able to start living. If you ask me, delaying all fun and pleasure until late in life – when there is no guarantee that you will even be able to enjoy it – is a fundamental misreading of how we should be spending our time. Financial independence has much more to do with being able to set the terms for how you spend your days, rather than simply dropping everything and becoming completely idle. You’ll notice that many hard-charging types have a very hard time adjusting to retirement when they finally do make the transition – it simply isn’t natural to get into a habit of doing absolutely nothing. I would encourage you to look at that phase of life as a chance to explore more options for work, recreation, and travel – not as a time to be sent out to pasture for noting but leisure. There is no reason you can’t be having a perfectly fun and productive life throughout the entire duration of your journey.
What steps do you take to ensure that you are enjoying each day and living to the fullest?
You can also learn more by visiting my website: tonyneumeyer.com and registering to receive free trainings articles and more. Also subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me on Facebook. You can get your copy of The 7 Minute Millionaire and check out my other books here: https://tonyneumeyer.com/books/.
