Dandelions and Daydreams

Have you ever talked to your older self? Have you ever gotten advice from the future 80 year old self? In the winter of your life, what will you see as your greatest accomplishment? When you are 90 years old, what regrets will you have? Right now is the time that you can develop those accomplishments and ease those regrets. Can you make time to listen to your older self?

About once a year, I try to evaluate my life direction. The usual advice is to write your obituary. What do you want people to say about you when you are gone? What do you want people to remember about you? It’s a nice thought, but it doesn’t help me much with planning my life out today.

I’ve had a good chance to get acquainted with my 80-year old self. She doesn’t know anything that I don’t know today, but she has the courage–in the winter of life–to tell my spring time self to act now. She knows the pain of things left undone, and only I can ease that pain for her.

She’s the one who told me to write often and write passionately. Today she told me not to waste my life on clutter. There’s not enough time to devote it to things that I don’t really love.

What does your 80-year-old self have to say to you? Stop and listen to the wisdom within your own heart.

Three can change your life. Four is too many; two not enough, but three is just right. In Biblical numerology 3 is the number of Divine perfection, in your life, the rule of 3 can mean achieving success.

The Habit of Piling On

When I want to change something in my life (get more organized, lose weight, be more productive, etc), I tend to pile on. Take the example of getting more organized. I set my mind to working towards this goal, and I want the house perfect, the menu planned, my desk cleaned off, and the dishes washed, the bed made, the clothes clean and folded, the bathroom clean, the floors swept and mopped (or vacuumed), the bookshelves organized, and the plants watered–all the time.

When I set out with the goal of immediate perfection, my motivation lasts a grand total of 5 minutes. The to-do list that results from this goal of immediate perfection is what I call piling on.

The Rule of 3

The rule of 3 is an escape from the insanity of piling on. You see, when you want to change something, you apply the rule of 3, and set 3 manageable goals. You put all your energy towards achieving those goals before you add more. Adding goals 3 at a time will slowly and steadily get you to your final goal.

Back to the organization goal, I could apply the rule of 3 by working towards having the dishes washed every night, keeping my desk clear, and making the bed daily.

Create lasting success

The real value of the rule of 3 is in creating lasting success as you build habit upon habit and routine upon routine. When your habits and routines combine together, you will find that you have reached your goal without crashing and burning.

Next time you want to change your life, try the rule of 3.

Do you ever wish you had more hours in your day? I am always running just a bit behind. My day starts out with too much to do and ends with even more left to do. When you look at your day, how much time do you spend doing things with little or no relevance to your work or life goals?

We all have time wasters. You may not like to admit it, but some things are less productive than others. If you could cut out one irrelevant task, you could probably save 15 minutes a day. What would you do with an extra 1 3/4 hour every week?

Now take that challenge one step further? Do you have 3 daily tasks that don’t help you reach your goals? If you could cut out just 3–15 minute daily tasks, you would gain 5 1/4 hours per week.

Those 5 hours you gain could help you achieve your goals in work or in life.

To give you some help identifying your three things, I thought I would share my list:

• Excessive blog feeds. While I use blog’s to find inspiration for writing, I don’t need to read quite so many. I’m going to cut my subscription list by 10%.
• Dealing with excess clutter. Clutter is the stuff that doesn’t have a home. It’s what makes the house messy and makes cleanup take longer. While I can’t eliminate in in one step, I can get rid of a few things each night until I have decluttered my home.
• Nightly movies. Our local library has a great selection of movies. I just realized that we are watching a movie almost every night. I could gain almost 14 hours a week just by cutting that out!

What are your3 things?

Everybody seems to be talking about living a completely fulfilled life. What does a fulfilled life look like? What fulfills your life? How would you change your life now to be fulfilled? How can you achieve a fulfilled life?

The fulfilled life looks different for each person, and what would be the fulfilled life for you, might be absolute failure for me. Even so, Living the fulfilled life stems from the same root, no matter who you are. The challenge is learning what kind of flowers blossom from your branch.

The Root of a Fulfilled life.

To love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. And to love your neighbor as yourself. (Matthew 22:37-40)

Love God. Love your neighbor. Love yourself.

What does it look like to Love God?

There are a lot of voices about how to love your neighbor and even more about how to love yourself, but how do you love God? Now there is a loaded question. Loving God means keeping His commandments, but it also means living out His will in your life.

God is like a great storyteller, and you have a unique role to play in the story that He is telling. He created you with passions and desires so that you could use them within His plan. Don’t spend your time chasing the things that drag you down, but look for opportunities to use your God-given talents.

The bad news: There is no such thing as a completely fulfilled life.

After telling you all that, there is no such thing as a completely fulfilled life…

…not on this Earth anyways.

We were created to be in a perfect, unhindered relationship with God, and we were created to be in a perfect, unhindered relationship with other humans.

We can strive towards that perfect relationship with God and the perfect relationships with humans, but while we are on this earth, sin will always hinder perfect relationships. As much as I would like to find total joy, I am thankful that there is a perfect place for the perfect, complete life because the perfect, complete life isn’t suitable for an imperfect world. We just have to do the best we can here.

Photo by Rachel_thecat, cc-by-sa

Goals are a great thing. They keep you moving forward in a direction you want to go, but too often, in our perfectionism, we set too many goals and lose focus.

I would guess that the average person can only focus on achieving 2 or 3 goals at a time. I’m talking about short-term goals here. Yeah, you should make long-term goals and have a vision for your life, but the goals that you are focusing on this month, this year, today…limit the number.

Keeping your goals in focus is necessary to achieve your goals. Having just 3 goals versus having 10 or 20 goals is the difference between pen point accuracy and a splat against the wall.

Take some time today to limit your goals, and focus on success.