Determine the Life You Want to Live
I was listening to a story, and it talked about how we get the cart before the horse. I'm going to share this story. It was in a little itty-bitty fishing town, a man sees this guy out fishing.
The guy catches some fish, he's got a small amount of fish, and he brings them in. He strikes up a conversation with this business person.
This business person asked, "Why didn't you catch more fish?" The man replies, "I’ve got enough fish. I’ve got enough fish to sell, some to eat for my family, and we're good." The business man asked, "Well, what are you going to do with the rest of your day?" The fisherman responds, "Well, I'm going to go home to play with my kids, take a nap, spend some time with my wife. We'll go out to dinner. We'll go into town, and we'll have some wine. I'll play guitar, and it's just good life."
The businessman responds, "Well, you could catch more fish.” He asks, "Why wouldn't you catch more fish so you can make more money? Then, you could buy more boats, and you could create this empire of fishing, and then you could sell the business, and then you could have all this money, retire, and live wherever you want."
The fisherman asks, "Why would I want to do that? How long would that take?"
The businessman responds, "Well, it'll take about 15 to 20 years. And at the end of it, maybe you could sell all that. You’ll have all that money and then you could fish when you want. You can hang out with your kids. You can take a nap whenever you want. You can maybe go into town and drink some wine, have dinner, and play guitar."
The businessman catches himself, and he's like, "Oh, that's the life you're living…"
See, what I learned from that is, so often we see someone else living a certain life and we feel like if we force ourselves to live that life, we'll become happy.
Instead, what if we said, "Determine what it is going to cost to live the life you want, and how do you get there?"
So that's my encouragement and challenge to you today: determine the life you want to live, and then create a plan to live that life.
