Priorities in Action: Choosing What Truly Matters
How Letting Go of "Doing It All" Helped Me Find Fulfillment, Growth, and Clarity.
If you're anything like me, you often feel pulled in different directions. However, I discovered tools to navigate and endure the process, ultimately thriving at a level I never thought achievable.
The best, most fulfilling things in my life (sometimes) feel like they exist at opposite ends of a spectrum. I want to be professionally successful, but I also want to prioritize my family. I want to be financially stable without obsessing over nickels and dimes. I want to grow emotionally, physically, and spiritually, but I like (and need) my leisure time. And I'm caught in the middle, swinging chaotically like a three-dimensional Newton's Cradle.
It feels as though I'm attempting to wrestle the stars into a specific alignment; I've been assigned this role, and my only task is one of Sisyphean difficulty and magnitude. It's easy to think dramatically like that, and if I allow myself, I can fixate on my failure or lack of progress as if it were the job I had been assigned. I know I'm not the only person who feels this way—that it seems impossible to achieve the things we've all agreed to (implicitly or explicitly).
What Bad Looks Like
The clearest sign that I'm going astray—which has happened many times—is when my wife starts talking to me about things. Whether it's my entrepreneurial efforts, training, or travel schedule, when my wife talks, I listen. She understands how vital it is for me to be an engaged father, not just because it matters to me but also because it serves an essential role in our co-parenting journey. Establishing a scenario where my wife is seen as the "default parent" isn’t a suitable option for us, so it’s vital for both her and me that I fulfill my role as "dad" effectively.
So when she sits me down and says, "I don't feel like you have any time for me to engage with you," it makes me pause and assess. I could (and have) dismissed it by saying to her, "Well, that's your perception; it's not reality." That approach never worked well, mainly because her perception is her reality (thanks, Immanuel Kant), and I want to help foster a reality where she feels comfortable engaging with me. It doesn't feel good to know that my wife feels like she doesn't fit into my life. It feels even worse when she tells me I'm being distracted around our boys.
It's the sharpest knife to realize that one of my boys has been saying, "Daddy... daddy... daddy..." and I haven't responded. I’m not suggesting that I should hang on to their every word or become a helicopter parent. However, during the limited time they are home from school and awake, I want to devote myself to them fully. Violating this hurts more than failure or lack of progress in any other endeavor that I have.
How I Fixed It
So, how did I fix it? Well, I haven't. Not completely. This is frustrating because realizing something isn't working, denying it, feeling guilt and shame, and ultimately accepting it is incredibly painful. And it takes a lot of time, so it's easy to be upset about feeling like I've "wasted time" to boot. I'm fortunate to have experienced facing harsh realities (thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous), and the only constant I've been able to discover is the understanding that when it hurts and creates anxiety, I'm on the brink of growth. Ultimately, no one ever figures it out forever. Life is too unpredictable and changeable for that. The best I've been able to do is develop a more effective plan that works for the time being. And when it doesn't anymore, I'll have to adjust again.
This latest time, I took this further than ever: I decided to step back from nearly everything and concentrate on my family. I've left a fantastic professional coaching organization called FitFilliate, where I advised CrossFit affiliate owners and coaches on achieving greater financial success. I've shuttered my personal training business, supporting the coaches who worked with me in their transitions to other businesses or their own services.
The only things I'll take on now must satisfy two questions in a specific order:
Am I willing to ask my wife and children to sacrifice for me to do this thing?
Would I do this thing for free?
These two requirements have given me remarkable clarity about what fits and doesn't in my life. They've helped create a situation where I'm best serving my family, taking care of myself, and allowing ample time for the growth I know will continue to make me a better husband and father.
How You Can Use This
So, how can you find the same clarity in your life? For me, it comes down to priorities. We're far too much in the habit of thinking that everything is a priority when almost nothing is. So, if I just said, "You have to prioritize," I'd be setting you up for failure. Instead, we can use a framework for stepping through all the things we think are important and find the ones that are. It's called "The 5/25 Rule," and it's got an excellent video that explains it well here:
Here's the TL;DR version:
Write down 25-30 things that you want to accomplish in the foreseeable future. Nothing is off the table.
Then, rank the items in order of importance, and rewrite the list, starting at 1 and continuing to the end (with 1 being the most important thing), and then circle the top five.
Now, everything you didn't circle just became your "Avoid At All Cost" list.
Congratulations, you've identified your priorities! From now on, in everything you do, you can decide whether you’re moving toward or away from one of those five things. You do things that move you closer, and don't do things that move you away. Here's your challenge: Set this as your rule for life, your North Star, for six months, and tell me at the end that you're not a completely changed human.
Conclusion
Ultimately, clarity isn’t about perfectly balancing every aspect of life—it’s about aligning your actions with what truly matters. This clarity has been liberating, enabling me to step off the hamster wheel of trying to “do it all” and instead concentrate on what truly matters. It’s a process, not a destination. There will always be adjustments, moments of doubt, and opportunities to grow. However, the rewards of living intentionally and being fully present for the people and values that define your life are worth every effort. Life will never stop pulling us in different directions, but we can choose our response. When we prioritize purposefully, we don’t just survive the chaos—we thrive within it. Take the time to define your five priorities, embrace them fully, and observe how they transform your world.