I ran across this article today….and while I do not typically write on topics like this, I find that it is very important……important enough for me to share with you. The whole article is not very long and worth the read for sure!

The three items of gold from the article that particularly hit home for me are:

1) “Everything involves sacrifice. Everything includes some sort of cost. Nothing is pleasurable or uplifting all of the time. So the question becomes: what struggle or sacrifice are you willing to tolerate? Ultimately, what determines our ability to stick with something we care about is our ability to handle the rough patches and ride out the inevitable rotten days.”

2) “What most people don’t understand is that passion is the result of action, not the cause of it.”

3) “What is your legacy going to be? What are the stories people are going to tell when you’re gone? What is your obituary going to say? Is there anything to say at all? If not, what would you like it to say? How can you start working towards that today?”

Something I have realized lately are that the things that use to hold value for me and were my extrinsic motivators have changed. I no longer derive satisfaction and fulfillment from what I have the past 15 years of my life. I currently am at an in-pass of where I have been and where I want to be. At the age of 38, I hardly think this is the appropriate time in my life to have these thoughts! Yet, here they are and here I am.

My thoughts:

1) Life is made up of a lot of different cost/benefits jammed together. The sacrifices/costs that I used to be willing to tolerate are no longer so. Now the rough patches are increasingly more difficult. Is this the true catalyst to change??

2) I have never been much of a “talker”; I am a “doer”…..an “action taker”. The less you do the less you want to do. Motivation is not cultivated from complacency. Doing something, anything is better than not doing at all. At the very least by doing, you will learn what or how not to do or what you do not want to do.

3) I said before and I’ll say it again….if you do not know where you are going you will not know how to get there. If you can define, imagine, visualize, describe, believe, know…what the end game looks like you are much more likely to arrive there. It can be argued there is never a “there” there though; the end game is always moving and evolving.

The problem is that most people while not content, fulfilled, or satisfied with their life or areas of their life, do not put forth the time and effort to soul search and think through these things…..to answer those questions. People go day-in-and-day-out knowing they want something different but just keep living the same life anyway. Life is short, really short, too short….