Get What You Want By Focusing On What You Shouldn’t Do

You should enjoy life, and simultaneously, you should be successful. And I'm joking, because this was all about shooting all over yourself. But really, honestly, what you should do is make sure that you live your life so intentionally and catch yourself when these things creep up.

And we're back with another episode of He Said, she Said.

All right, so we're sitting up here at the lake house, and this is definitely a dream come true. We walked by this place the last two years. You know, we'd come up to Mom's and spend time at her lake house up here in Wisconsin. And we'd walk past this place as it was being built the last two years and say, oh, whoever is building that, that is, like, the perfect place. I would love a place like that one day. And then after two years of walking by it every day, when we'd be up here, all of a sudden a for sale sign went in the yard, and here we are. Tell me the world doesn't conspire in your favor, right? But now that we're up here, we realize that we are so bad at shoulding all over ourselves. I said should. You don't have to beep that out. At shoulding all over ourselves. You've heard this term before, right? Like, oh, I should be working. We don't have to. I should be making money. I should be doing this. I should be doing that. And I've got such guilt when I just sit here, like right now with my coffee and my feet up, taking an extra long morning.

Yeah. Chris and I wanted to come on to let you know that it's not just you if you're feeling that way. I have so many moments where I'm noticing I am the robber of my peace. I am the person who is sabotaging my own peace. And how can we become more aware, and what can we do about it when it happens? So. So for me, I've just noticed so many moments where I'm doing things that are productive. I'm organizing the house, I'm making sure that I'm getting work done. But for some reason, there's this next level of, oh, my God, if I'm enjoying myself, there must be something wrong. And that is so crazy, because I feel like I work so hard on this, yet it's still there. And I really do believe that if we can learn how to manage our brains and. And really be in the moment of enjoying the things that we want to enjoy and not let the other things in, that that is the recharging moments, and that's what we have to remember is that when you enjoy yourself, that's when you get your ideas back, that's when you get your creativity back. That's when you collapse time. Enjoyment is a sign that you'll be able to collapse time when you go to do the tasks that you need to get done for, quote, unquote, work.

That's such a great point. You know, I know I've talked about this before on the show, but in case you haven't heard me reference this, I had a boss way back when when I worked at hsbc. And I had such a love hate relationship with him because he was a great leader. But because he was such a great leader, he would give us a lot of tough things, right? And I would always say to him, I'd say, why do you give us such unrealistic deadlines? Like, this is crazy, this is impossible. And he'd look at me and he'd say, Chris, if I gave you a box this big and picture my arms stretched out, or a box this big and now picture my hands pretty close together, he said, you would get the same amount of work done in the container that I give you. That's why I give you short deadlines. And he was right. It's what you just said. There's plenty of time to do what needs to be done. But it's our programming, the same programming that allowed us to just buy this place when we saw the for sale sign go in. The same programming that creates the consistency that put us in that position. The same programming that makes us obsess over what's next, what's bigger, what's next, what's bigger? It's that same programming that if you are not the programmer of your programming will sabotage you and rob you of the very goal, the very thing that you were aiming for. And so it's been kind of neat to be conscious of this, to see it, to catch it. And I've been asking myself, it's a funny little juvenile question, but whenever it pops up, I've just been saying, for what? But why? It's like, oh, I should be working right now, but why? Oh God, I should be making more money right now. For what? Just ask yourself those two questions. For what? But why? And if there's a legitimate answer, get to work. If there's not, kick back, grab that cup of coffee again and spend some time living life. We just read a book called 4000 Weeks, right? And the idea is if you live till you're about 80 years old, you have 4,000 weeks in this world. That's it. And Lori and I, well, I can't speak for your age, babe, but I'm 44, so that means I'm probably down to a couple thousand weeks. Let that sink in. I've got about 2,000 weeks left, if I'm lucky to really enjoy life. I don't want to piss away a moment of. Of that doing anything more than I need to do to maintain the goals and the life that I desire.

I was thinking the other day about where a lot of my pain comes from. A lot of pain in general, and it's always from an expectation that is unmet. And when I say expectation, we make up expectations all day, every day with ourselves. I should weigh this amount. I should eat this today. I should go and do that because I saw it online and that girl is doing that. I should start this online extra online program. I should create a product. I should. All of these things that all of a sudden we grab from the ether and decide out of the blue we should add them to our never ending to do list. And then when they don't get done because we're already busy and making a better life is usually taking away things, not adding more things that all of a sudden we have a hundred new expectations that we woke up and added in our brain that don't get met that day.

Yeah. Yeah. So listen, as our friend Ed Bylette would say, max out. So max out your goals, max out your potential, but damn it, max out life, too. And I know Ed has actually talked about this with us recently on the show, is he doesn't want to waste a minute with his family. He's so intentional. He doesn't want to waste a minute with his downtime. He's so intentional. And that's really was the premise of us buying this is we wanted to max out our enjoyment of life. And come hell or high water, I'm going to protect the boundaries to make that happen.

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You know something that I'm going to start doing when I hear it in my head? Because we, we use words when we're talking to ourselves. Obviously it's like, oh, I should do that. I'm literally going to say, I should not do that today. I should not do that. I should take things away in order to have more space or focus more on the things that I love. And we were listening in 4,000 weeks, and he said this amazing exercise. He literally says to write down 20 things that are most important to you that you want to do in your life. And he said, cross off the last 15, never do them, and only focus on the first five. That was so profound to me.

He said the first five became your first five because they were the most important things to you. And the other 15 were just very alluring distractions.

Yes, alluring. Isn't that the truth? They're just alluring distractions. If you just focus on the first five, you'll probably have a pretty great life. It's the other 15 that make us feel like, oh, God, I haven't taken that trip to Europe yet. I haven't learned how to do watercolor paintings yet. Like, all of these extra little things. That would be amazing. But they're the things that cause us pain. Because really, the first five things are the most important to you.

Yeah. So, guys, you should enjoy life, and simultaneously, you should be successful. And I'm joking, because this was all about shooting all over yourself. But really, honestly, what you should do is make sure that you live your life so intentionally and catch yourself when these things creep up. That's what we wanted to share with you. Love and appreciate listening as always.

Thank you, guys. We'll see you next week.

Sam.