WHY IS EVERYONE IN SUCH A HURRY?

Yesterday I met a woman who is running her own successful business. She established it three years ago and it is doing well. She is building a reputation for herself as an expert in her field.

But she has a grand vision and she feels she still has a long way to go to achieve it. ‘Why have I only got this far in four years’ she lamented to me. ‘I should have achieved so much more by now’.

Another entrepreneur echoed similar sentiments to me last week. He too has only been in business a short while – five years to be precise.  ‘We should be further ahead than we are’ he told me. ‘It is taking much longer to make everything happen than I expected’.

WE SET UNREALISTIC GOALS FOR OURSELVES

People nowadays are in too much of a hurry, whether at work or in their personal lives.

We are continually setting arbitrary landmarks and benchmarks for what we think we ‘should’ or ‘ought’ to have achieved by the time we have reached a certain age.

30 year-olds feel they should have their lives sorted. 40 year-olds feel they should have achieved more than they have. 50-year olds wonder if they have done enough with their years.

WHERE DOES THE PRESSURE COME FROM?

Everyone will have a different view as to where the pressure to achieve comes from. Parental expectations, sibling rivalry, best friends’ doing brilliantly, the power of the media to influence our ideas and expectations of ourselves.

Everyone is in a hurry to go somewhere.

LIVING A SUCCESSFUL LIFE

But the real test of a successful life is how you experience the journey.  It’s about how you live each day, how you treat the people who are close to you, whether at home or at work or at play. It’s how you feel about yourself and what you are doing with your time. Are you happy and enjoying yourself? Are you working towards your dreams at your own pace and not at someone else’s? Are you being kind enough, loving enough, tolerant enough? Are you working hard enough but in a consistent, steady kind of way rather than in a tearing haste?

Technology makes time seem as if it is moving faster than in the past. It feels as if our lives have speeded up.

But what life is really about is simply living each day for itself – not yearning for things past, berating ourselves for mistakes we think we have made or constantly focusing on what we might achieve in the future. It’s not about setting arbitrary benchmarks which may suit some people some of the time but certainly aren’t appropriate for everyone all the time.

WHAT YOU DO NEED TO BENCHMARK

The way a person lives their days is the truest measure of who they really are. And who you really are and how much you have loved and whether you have truly tried to live a life of integrity, authenticity and value, is truly the only thing you need to measure.

Judy


www.judypiatkus.com
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