WHAT DO I VALUE?
Carl Paoli, a well-known Crossfit, mobility, and gymnastics instructor, has a maxim around personal training that I’m obsessed with:
“I don’t care what you do, as long as you know why you’re doing it.”
Crossfit, being a combination of many disciplines (strength, mobility, endurance, Olympic weightlifting, and gymnastics, just to name a few), each being able to easily monopolize all of your training time, prioritization is key to accomplishing your goals.
The kicker is that this approach begs the ultimate question, “what do I value?” It’s one that I’ve been working tirelessly to answer in every area of my life since I read the 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch six years ago.
It’s hard for me to over-emphasize how important this question is for everyone to answer, because if you believe that life really comes down to balancing your distribution of resources (time, energy, money, love, etc.), then figuring out what matters to you applies to everything you do. By that same logic, the easiest way to live an unhappy, unfulfilled life is to ignore this process and do what everyone else values instead.
The most direct, intuitive example of this at work is in personal finance. Put simply, financial planning is about trade-offs between living for today (gadgets, clothes, food) and saving for some future event (a house, children’s education, retirement, vacation, etc.). And while most people are searching for that perfect investment everyone seems to be bragging about (usually that snob at work or your friend-of-a-friend that you heard is always making heaps of money in the stock market), the truth is there is no such thing as a best investment for everyone.
As Carl Richards, personal finance author and blogger rightly puts it, “The best investments depend entirely on personal factors — your goals, your personality, your risk tolerance, your existing holdings, your credit card balance, etc.”
Granted, this is nothing new, and I’m sure everyone at some level understands this intuitively, but seldom do people actually listen to this advice. Think about the entire publishing industry that rakes in millions in profit by telling mass consumers how to invest.
The reason advice and forecasts are so addictive is because they distract us from doing what matters most, which is figuring out what it is we really care want. But if we can suck it up, put in the upfront time and thought, create goals that reflect our priorities and then make choices that reflect those goals, we are setting ourselves up for success as we — not the pundits, not the media, and definitely not that snob at the office — define it.
As you consider the areas of your life that matter to you, whether it be fitness, investing, personal style, productivity, your career, or even de-cluttering your house, this exercise of getting to know what is important to you will not only keep you focused on your goals, but will also drown out the nonsense that will inevitably try to distract you from it (think: shopping ads and bad advice).
If you are like me, and everybody else I’ve talked about this with, you’ll find a profound joy in ignoring the endless stream of noise and bad advice out there, knowing that no one else in the world is more qualified to tell you what matters to you, but you.
