To care more for the things that are important to us — the people, the places, the work, the dreams — we have to give less of a shit about the things that aren’t important.
And that’s hard.
I would argue that “getting better” is seldom a matter of “doing more”. Instead, we improve when we take time and emotional energy away from things that aren’t important, and put them instead into the parts of our lives that are.
If you want to make a difference. If you want people to miss you. If you want your relationships to be more fulfilling — Don’t try to make a difference everywhere. Stop trying to be memorable to everyone. Go deeper with the few people that mean the world to you.
It feels like we’re making a difference when we do a little bit in a lot of places. Recycling plastic bottles, signing a petition here and there, putting ten bucks into an Instagram friend’s GoFundMe. While the effort comes from a good place - the change our world needs, requires more from you than a passing good deed.
What we miss out on by being everywhere is the chance to be missed somewhere - should we disappear tomorrow. Ask yourself, where do you want to be missed? Not because someone else was profiting off of or taking advantage of you, but because you made a difference.
Consumerism has cascaded into our lives in a thousand different ways, to such that we too want to be consumed by as many people as possible in as many ways as possible - but human lives are not bottomless. If we spread ourselves too thin, our roots won’t have the time to settle in the areas of our lives that need their strong foundation.
You can juggle 15 relationships with casual acquaintances, or you can bare your soul to the 2 or 3 people that mean the world to you.
That’s not to say you can’t have 15, 20, 50 friends — but in reality, the more you split your time and energy, the less of “you” shows up where it matters. What’s important will change over time, but we should always be ready to give good attention to what’s in front of us.
To nurture a relationship into something deep and fulfilling, we need to pull time and energy away from relationships that don’t serve us.
To excel at at our craft, we have to spend less time doing things that don’t make us better.
To have the emotional capacity to understand ourselves and be better people (whatever that looks like for you), you have to give less of a shit about things that aren’t important.
- A lesson I'm trying to live by
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