Raise the Anchors

Problems in one area of life have consequences in every area of life.

Howdy 🤠

Let me be the first to welcome you to the 34th week of 2023. It feels like time has been moving quickly this year and summer is already slipping away from us.

This week, let’s take a closer look at how our performance in the most important areas of our lives affects how we approach everything else.

I hope the ideas and prompts below provide fertile ground for reflection and as always, thanks for reading!

Kevin

P.S. What thoughts and theories have you been pondering recently? Hit reply and let me know! I’m always looking for new ideas and perspectives to share with you all each week 🙂.

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Raise the Anchors

Photo by Pascal Debrunner on Unsplash

Whatever excites you, go do it. Whatever drains you, stop doing it.

Derek Sivers

Each of us has things that are of outsize importance to us. We work tirelessly to make improvements in all these areas of our lives and if any of them were taken away we would be devastated.

In many ways, these worthwhile pursuits seem separate from one another, like filling up multiple cups from a big pitcher, but the reality is the opposite. These pursuits all stem from their own cups, but our life is what we get when we pour everything together.

If the contents of any cup aren’t as they should be, the mixture won’t be what we want.

As much as we might want everything to be separated into their own containers, work spills into family life, family life spills into fitness, fitness spills into having fun, and having fun spills into our finances. No matter how hard we try to compartmentalize our lives, problems in one area of life have consequences in every area of life.

If we’re not making enough money to support our lifestyle, the work we pour into every other worthwhile pursuit will always have an asterisk next to it. If we’re struggling or stressed at work, that tension will manifest in our family life and health.

When most things are going well, we tend to ignore the one thing that isn’t. Despite our best efforts, it always pulls us down and it feels silly to let one bad thing ruin all of the great things so we begin to feel guilty for not enjoying all of the great things in our lives as much as we should be.

There are too many opportunities to do incredible things to waste time slogging through something that’s holding us back.

Our lives are not a series of unrelated pursuits. If something important isn’t right, we need to fix it. And if we can’t fix it; quit it.

Jesuit colleges are centered around the Latin phrase “cura personalis” which translates to care for the whole person. The phrase serves as a helpful reminder that every piece of our lives is important and impacts all the others, but “cura personalis” is not something that we can check off a to-do list.

There will always be imbalances, shortcomings, and new problems to solve, but each challenge we overcome and mismatched opportunity we leave behind, the better we become.

We’ll never be perfect, but we can constantly work towards a growing baseline of enjoyment, fulfillment, and purpose in everything we do by identifying and raising the anchors holding us back.

Prompts

1. Which worthwhile pursuit feels like an anchor holding you back?

2. Are you prone to quitting too fast or trying to fix a lost cause for too long?

3. What does your version of “cura personalis” look like?

Deep Dive

• The Dip - Seth Godin

  • A short book that teaches you when to quit and when to stick with it.

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Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.

Kevin