Link to The Beginning and to Yesterday’s Post

Welcome:

Welcome to my journey. Yesterday I laid out my life goals for quarter 2 of 2021, which is the time between now and June 9th when I turn 50. This tends to be the point in life when men and women take stock of where they’re at in life, in relation to where they thought they’d be. This is especially important for me because as a coach I’m a big believer in context:

We need to know who we are
Where we are
Where we believe we want to go, and
The plans we believe will take us there.

I try to do that thinking two to four times a year, but what sets this time apart is my 50th birthday. This could be the pinnacle of my life in many ways. I don’t mean because I’m cresting some hill and it’s all downhill from here. I just mean that my youthful physical strength hasn’t gone yet, but I’ve lived enough to gain some wisdom. Many philosophers comment that it takes 40 to 50 years for a man to figure out where to begin. We can lament that life is half over before we figure out what’s going on, but I choose to take heart. Warren Buffet built his fortune starting in his 50’s. Sometimes the big work of our lives doesn’t reveal itself until we’ve walked far enough down the road that we can see it.

Quick Recap:

I like to group my life goals so because we can’t work on everything all the time and we can’t really do one thing to the exclusion of everything else. That’s not to say we don’t benefit from doing an 80/20 purge. It’s good to prioritize things that we do well and delegate or delete things with low yield. But by grouping my goals into quadrants I can balance be intentional about moving the things forward evenly and not neglecting something that later caps my growth. (Think of a half barrel filled with water. It won’t hold more water than the height of the shortest slat.)

Whenever I can, I pick a single project that moves several categories forward–my one big thing of the season.

So I use the classic categories:

You’ve heard the old saying, “Early to bed early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise?” Well, I think that brilliant. I’m not the first to find it so. Craig Ballantyne started an awesome challenge called ETR (for Early to Rise), which lets you set your own goal in one of those areas and then puts the winners in a raffle to win $10,000. He has some great resources and I love his journey to success story.

I see 4 categories in the old saying. Health and Wealth are self explanatory. Wisdom, to me, is about Spiritual Health because “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom” (Prov. 9:10). I also see the Early to Bed/Rise part as indicating schedule and organization being a value. (I include things like doing an 80/20 efficiency/effectiveness audit). Yes its saying that the action of maintaining a good schedule is key to success in the other areas, but I think engaging with each of these 4 quadrants on a regular (daily or weekly) basis will help the other quadrants. It’s possible, even common, to exclude one of these quadrants in our daily life, but it will end up making it harder to succeed in the other areas.

So my categories are (2) Health, (4) Wealth, (1) Wisdom, and (3) Organization. I give you priority numbers (#) because I rank them in order of my values.

The Plan:

I spoke of my priorities in My One Big Thing Section of yesterdays blog. Build an ADU into our new house & move in, without losing ground on my health or career (both of which had already started to stall out because of Covid and Phase 1 stress of selling mom’s house/finding a house). I also announced that I’ll be blogging nearly every day for 63 days as a way of maintaining perspective during this busy season.

I haven’t yet shared the rest of the One Big Thing Plan. Starting with Schedule. I’m going to rise everyday at 5AM and go to bed and read at 9:30 each night. The first 5 hrs belong to God–I worship, shower, cartoon breakfast with my daughter*, journal (AM Pgs**), men’s prayer call, and writing a blog.

I don’t start the career/income portion of my day until 10AM (unless I have a special circumstance and this is for 63 days remember, some seasons have different rules). I say career/income because as a self employed person/independent contractor it’s not a simple thing to describe and mostly nothing you’d want to read about. What is worth mentioning is that I’m following my own advice, which I’ve given many times on blog posts, coaching session and speeches, that entrepreneurs should set a work schedule and protect the time they allocate for family and personal time. For this 63 day season, I have between 10AM and 5PM to deliver value and earn income.

My evenings belong to my family. This will shift a little as I can justify remodeling our new house as time spent for my family, but I’m still going to draw a circle around specific date nights with my wife and with my daughter.

Tomorrow I’ll go a little deeper into my diet and health plans for this season and/or my plans to make gains in my career/income too. But this post is getting long so I’ll end with a quick update (some of which will make more sense after tomorrows post).

Quick Update:

I got up this morning at 4:50 AM (10 minutes early) My time with the Lord was great, no new revelations. Time with my daughter and my men’s prayer call. Everything went to plan which I’m not assuming will always be the case, but I’m off to a great start. I’ve been doing well at eating my punishment food, LOL, which is something I’ll explain tomorrow.

We signed papers yesterday on the house and it recorded with the county this morning. So as soon as I complete some work projects and take a meeting with the pastor of my church, I will pick up my daughter at school and meet my wife and mom at the new house! WOOOT! I can’t wait to start the reno over there later this week.