When it feels like life is pulling you in a dozen different directions, the way you get focused is by realizing that you simply cannot care about everything.
You were not built to carry the weight of the entire world on your shoulders, even when that world is simply within your own four walls.
There is no requirement upon you to do everything perfectly, all of the time. You do not have to manipulate every experience into its maximum potential, you do not have to complete every imaginable task that sounds worthwhile in a day, in a week, in a month.
What you have to do is decide what’s going to matter to you, and then you have to let go of everything else.
When you don’t, you offer up more of your life to managing your tension and discomfort than you do the things you actually want to create. You spread yourself so thin that not enough energy is given to anything to really make it work.
You end up not with a life perfected, but a life in pieces.
You end up with half-starts and full stops, everything sort of empty and yourself never really full. You end up with a life you pieced together out of obligation and fear, not one you grew and nourished out of love and inspiration.
And it shows.
It shows through every crack of every moment that you spend rushing to the next task, treating your entire existence like a to-do list that you just have to get to the bottom of — except there is no bottom, and the only thing you’re possibly running toward is death.
The most positive and productive decision you could ever make for your life is simply to choose what is going to matter to you and then to let go of everything that isn’t that.
This isn’t to say that you neglect your responsibilities simply because the rote tasks of life management aren’t atop your value list, but that you find ways to automate, outsource, carve out specific days to handle them so that you free up the rest of your time.
It’s to say that you spend your days focused solely on the most important place your energy and attention might go.
Because what nobody tells you is that it’s not how many things you accomplish in a day, but the spaces where your energy is most consistently concentrated that give you the best outcomes in life.
It’s not that you do a hundred things halfheartedly, but that you pick a handful and give it your all.
This means that you allow yourself to be imperfect.
This means that you acknowledge you are not, and no longer desire to be, the absolute best at anything you do.
And if you are an ambitious person, it will be humbling to admit you don’t have time to dress perfectly and make Instagram-worthy meals and keep your house pristine and take on an abundance of work and keep your relationships thriving.
So what you choose instead is to wear what feels right and go out to dinner with your friends and spend your days on the projects that light you up inside and trust that your ongoing devotion to them will eventually culminate in a result so beautiful, a life so curated, you have no choice but to love it, you have no choice but to sit back and settle in and embrace what you’ve created.
The truth that almost nobody tells you is that what we try to do too perfectly we turn into its opposite.
We are not meant to be formulated and hustled and hacked, but embraced, allowed, and gently cultivated in the few areas that most make us come alive.