[story] Fundamental goals

Quick story of some life changes I made over the last five years. I used to spend all of my free time sitting on my ass playing video games. It was...ok, but in general my life was pretty depressing. I decided to make some changes and I identified three "fundamental" things that I thought would make me happier:

• Good Relationships
• Autonomy (i.e., money and control over my own free time)
• Expertise (i.e., possessing skills, whether for work or recreation)

I then wrote down a list of things that would help me make progress on those goals. It's a long-ish list, so I won't write it all out here, but for example: I try to do something nice every day for the people I care about to improve or maintain good relationships. I significantly trimmed down my spending (on shit!) so that I could build up some emergency savings. I picked up a few new hobbies (which I've narrowed down primarily to golf and cooking). You'll see that all this effort generally maps to the goals above.

I'm not fastidiously tracking "points" in a spreadsheet, but I do keep mental tabs on how much time I've spent on what each day. After five years, this approach has worked out great. Not only am I happier, I'm much more disciplined because I can connect the dots between what I'm doing and how it will benefit me. I can see value in even the most mundane tasks.

I think the thing that surprised me the most was how much the "expertise" goal has given me purpose and fulfillment. Like I said above, I do a lot of golfing and cooking now. Because of these, I have connections and relationships with people that I just wouldn't have had. (The same could be said of gaming of course, but I do believe that learning/training/doing something outside of the gaming world expands your horizons considerably). I also feel a lot of pride and happiness in doing something I've worked on for a long time. It feels great to possess a skill that no one else can just buy or learn how to do on YouTube in five minutes.

So that's just some food for thought. I'd be happy to expand on this "framework" I've developed for myself if anyone's curious.

Submitted June 03, 2017 at 11:19PM by i-downvote-memes http://ift.tt/2s53Dec