Recently I was watching a TikTok where a coach was describing the 6 things he does every year to ensure he lives an epic life. I’m sure you’ve seen these kinds of videos or read these kinds of posts—the ones that purport to hand you a formula for living the MOST AMAZING LIFE EVERRR AHHHHHH.
That video, and that whole vein of content, always rubs me the wrong way. The idea that we need to push and strive every day, every week, every year, in order to be happy, simply stresses me out.
The problem, I think, is this assumption that life isn’t good enough until it’s great. Like you really need to attend a School of Greatness and 10X your life and take Massive Action to achieve success is just…twisted.
I do love the idea of setting goals for yourself, goals that make you genuinely happy, goals that give you a feeling of purpose and channel your otherwise scattered energy toward the causes and change-making and creative works you want to accomplish in your lifetime.
For example, that video I watched (which I can’t attribute, because I’ve already forgotten who made it, forgive me) suggested that every year, you do at least one “epic” thing, like start a podcast, or run a marathon, or whatever. I love this in theory because who doesn’t want a life that they can look back on and say I did all of these amazing things; I felt alive, and I got to taste and enjoy the full breaths of human potential and experience.
The thing I can’t stomach is this bombastic, intense, relentless focus on the accumulation of new and “massive” accomplishments, which trivializes the existing and “minor” achievements most of us already have at our fingertips.
Like last year, for example, my “epic” goal was to get my groove back. What does that even mean in the language of Epic Wins and Major Milestones? Not much, I’m guessing, but the fact that I was able to make time for myself and enjoy my life as a new mom and independent human being felt like an incredible accomplishment. And it was!
The real problem is that our cultural fixation on extraordinary success has us defining our goals and life satisfaction against impossible standards. No doubt this contributes to the grind we feel when it comes to personal and professional development.
At its core, I believe, this is where hustle culture comes from. We’ve been taught that our safety, security, and personal happiness rest on our ability to do more, achieve more, and work and play hard without stopping, without ever taking anything away.
This scarcity-driven hoarding of achievements and experiences feels an awful lot like consumerism.
Let’s just imagine that you became someone who runs a marathon. Presumably, you have running practice. If you’re going from the couch to a 5K to start, you learn how to run, and you make it a part of your lifestyle. Similarly, if you start a podcast, you’re theoretically getting ready to create podcast episodes every week or every month for who knows how long. Presumably indefinitely?
We take on personal and professional development projects without really paying attention to the fact that our capacity and bandwidth are limited. We simply can’t do everything. Not everything all at once. Like they say, you could have it all, but not all at once.
Which leads me to my big idea: the antidote to hustle culture is a commitment to having less.
When you’re caught in the anxiety or toxic crush of “needing” to take on more, remind yourself that for everything you take on, something else has to go. You must find ways to expand your energetic and emotional capacity to meet the additional requirements of this new commitment.
You can compare it to decluttering your wardrobe. If you know you already have too many clothes, but you want to buy something new, you have to get rid of clothes to make room for better pieces.
Another tangible analogy for this concept: I have a small kitchen with limited storage space. What this means is whenever we discuss bringing in a new piece of kitchen equipment, like an air fryer or a pressure cooker, we have to decide where to put it. The physical limitations on our space are actually very helpful. There just isn’t room to add another large piece of equipment unless we get rid of something that we already have, build on an additional shed, or declutter some other storage space in our house, which is typically full of things that we use on a regular basis.
This physical limitation and natural boundary is what has allowed me to get rid of things like a mandolin when, if I’m honest, scallops and potatoes are not a big part of my culinary forays. I would rather have a less dangerous tool that I use more often in the kitchen. For a long time, we had a cute little double slow cooker, which was perfect for things like buffalo chicken dip and teriyaki meatballs. It is exactly the kind of thing you’d love to have on hand for game day, Super Bowl parties, or any kind of hosting with a laid-back feel.
And yet, the reality of our kitchen is that I just don’t have room for what is ultimately a decoration as opposed to a mandatory must-have piece of equipment. So we got rid of it.
You can apply the same philosophy to any new project that you take on. It starts by getting real with yourself about your current energetic and emotional limitations. If you look at everything on your plate, you can decide if you feel like your to-do list is already bursting at the seams and if so, what needs to be eliminated. Oftentimes, this is easy because you have to decide between things you really like to do and things you must do.
I find that the Eisenhower Matrix can be a very helpful tool to use if you need to do this kind of difficult parsing down of projects and priorities.
If you’re not familiar with it, the Eisenhower Matrix asks you to organize your current task or project list based on how urgent and important different tasks are to you. If everything is urgent, but very few things feel important, then there’s a solid chance you haven’t prioritized enough time for the work that gives you a feeling of meaning in your life. You may need to adjust some expectations or let people down by getting rid of some of the urgent things so that you have more space to accomplish what’s important.
On the flip side, if everything feels important but not that urgent, then you just need to tune in to your own gut instincts, decide what will make the biggest difference in your life moving forward, and assign that project and task a feeling of urgency.
The way you use this to help you identify what you can let go of is by doing yourself a favor and acknowledging that a healthy balance looks like a mix of both urgent and important tasks. If you’ve gone too far one way or the other, then you need to bring it back into balance.
Generally, you can find clever ways to let go of certain projects or tasks, so that you can accommodate a new one. Even if it just means postponing certain things for a few weeks or months, or even years, you can give yourself the spaciousness you need by consciously letting go and taking specific action items off your plate.
So the next time you’re looking at saying yes to a new project, volunteering to participate in your child’s school, or you think gosh it would be nice to do XY and Z that some online business expert or coach recommends you do, you should stop and decide if you actually have a room in your life to take that on in addition to everything else. If you don’t, and if your body’s immediate reaction is to seize up, say no, or wince away from the additional workload, then you have your answer. You’re currently overbooked, and you need to do less before you can say yes to doing more.
Do you have any success stories from slowing down and decluttering your to-do list? Do you routinely practice rebalancing your priorities based on what’s important versus what’s urgent?
I’d love to hear your experiences or questions in the comments.
