What Matters Most?

One of life’s most personal questions.  What Matters Most?

You are the only person in the entire world that can answer that question for you.

Over 6,775,235,700 people in this world and none of them can answer that question for you!

… the worlds one goal: chase what I say you should chase!

So, what is it?

Money?

Love?

Family?

Fame?

Security?

Status?

Career?

Freedom?

Popularity?

Beauty / Appearance?

Possessions?

Legacy?

Something else?

This is the first thing you need to figure out.  And you need to figure it out for yourself.

Because if you are not true to yourself you will be chasing all the bright, shiny distractions that this world will throw in your face.  And that is the worlds one goal: chase what I say you should chase!

Feel free to talk with someone you trust and that won’t judge you.  I find that I can talk to myself for hours and not come to any conclusions.  I usually just keep circling around the issues but never get to the core of them.  However 15 minutes of talking with someone that is willing to listen, and willing to help me delve into a topic will produce more insight and conclusions than I could by myself all day long.

If you start with the end in mind, you will know when you have reached your destination.

For me it is family and the freedom to spend time with them doing things we enjoy.   It hasn’t always been this way.  Up until the last few years, I have been asleep at the wheel, just blindly accepting what  the non-stop consumerism was telling me I needed to buy in order to be happy.

Although my family and I have had the dream of getting onto a sailboat and taking a long family cruise, we were still spending as much as we were earning, and eating out a couple of nights each week.

In order to reach our dreams we needed to stop, ask ourselves what we really wanted and then start to work towards that goal.

Now that we have agreed that having all the nice new shiny stuff is not getting us any closer to our dreams, it is much easier to resist frivolous spending.  Instead of watching commercials on tv and thinking, “Wow it sure would be nice to have that shiny new ______”, we now ask ourselves, “If I spend my money on that shiny new _______, how much longer will it take us to make our dreams come true?”.

Now don’t get me wrong, we are not turning our backs on all spending and making our kids wear clothes that we pull out of some dumpster somewhere.  We still buy the kids clothes when they need them.  We still eat out once in a while.  But, I am able to put off getting the latest and greatest cell phone.  The one I have makes and receives calls well enough.

Do I want a nice shiny, new MacBook Pro?  You bet I do!  Could I “justify” it?  Sure, I could tell myself how much faster it would be to edit my photographs on a new machine.  How much more I’d be inspired to write my blog posts when opening up a new MacBook.  How cool I would look when I plop myself down in the nearest Starbucks, sipping my over-priced mocha, gloriously tapping away at my brand new MacBook.

However nice those things would be, they don’t have a positive enough effect on getting us closer to our dreams.  The MacBook can wait.  It will come eventually, but right now it is not high enough on my list to warrant spending the money on it.

Knowing what matters most to you helps you to filter out the endless barrage of marketing that is trying to sidetrack you from your goals!

What kind of things are competing for your attention?  What is tempting you to put off your dreams?  More importantly, what is it that matters most to you?

Leave a comment and let us know.

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