What You Actually Care About
If I asked you to name what is most important in your life, you would tell me some combination of your family, your friends, your faith, your career/work, and maybe a specific cause or two. But what if I followed that question with this one?:
How do you know these are the most important things in your life?
Now the story starts to get interesting. Because the surprising truth is, there are things you think you care about that you actually don’t give two shits about.
You demonstrate what you value through your actions. And your actions can largely be understood as how you choose to deploy four key resources:
Your time
Your attention
Your energy
Your money
You may believe in your heart of hearts that staving off the impending bee extinction or protecting arts education in the classroom is important to you but if you aren’t devoting time, attention, energy, or money to it, you’re deceiving yourself.
You shouldn’t feel bad about this. In general, we think we know what we think but we really have no idea. I know that sounds like meaningless word salad but stay with me for a minute.
Have you ever surprised yourself with how intense of a negative reaction you had to a stray comment? If you took the time to reflect afterwards, you may have been struck with the realization that you cared far more about that person/topic/thing than you knew. That is because your brain is so much more complicated and capable than you realize that it can essentially keep a secret from itself.
DadBods develop because it’s so incredibly easy to lose sight of how we choose to allocate our most important resources. Even further, we lose sight of the fact that these resource allocations are choices at all.
We cede control of our time to other peoples’ priorities and to bad habits.
We divide our attention in a futile attempt to multi-task and rarely enter into genuine presence in the current moment.
We waste our energy giving too many fucks about things outside of our control and stubbornly defending opinions that were formed based on gut instinct rather than thoughtful consideration.
We work longer and longer hours to afford more and more stuff that we don’t have time to enjoy rather than spending extravagantly on what we love and cutting mercilessly on everything else.
But here is the upside: You can make significant changes to your resource allocations. Immediately.
Clearly, you can’t simply decide to only devote time, energy, attention, and money to your utmost meaningful pursuits and ignore the practical realities of life. There will always be things that require more of these resources than you would spend in a perfect world. Your flat tire doesn’t give a shit if you’d rather be taking a walk with your wife than digging a jack out of your trunk (or frantically calling AAA, in my case).
It’s also true that during certain seasons of life, you have less control over how your resources are deployed than during other times.
Yet if you’ve never taken time to critically but lovingly review your current allocation, you’re missing an opportunity to learn, for maybe the first time, what is truly important to you. And I guarantee that you will discover opportunities to make changes to bring things more in line with your ideal state.
Like with all personal development, the first step is to apply non-judgmental awareness to your current state.
To make this as engaging as possible, use one of your life’s passions to diagnose which resource allocation needs the most attention.
For something you truly love, devoting all four resources is as natural as breathing. In fact, one of the best ways to home in on your true passions in life is to hunt for what you would be happy to devote more of all four to.
“In a perfect world, I would be able to spend way more time, attention, energy, and money on ___________.” What first comes to mind?
Now, for which of the four resources is there the biggest gap between your ideal state and your current state when it comes to this passion? Do you spend money on it but rarely devote any meaningful amount of your time? Does it consume much of your attention, but you don’t take any action because your energy is being used up by other pursuits?
Once you’ve identified which resource is most out of whack compared to your ideal state for this passion, zoom out and assess how you’re allocating that resource across all the domains of your life.
Here is what this process looked like when I applied it to my love of books a few years ago:
Time: I spend a good deal of time reading, updating my booklist, and perusing used bookstores.
Attention: I’m fully engaged when reading, particularly non-fiction that I am marking up and taking notes about.
Energy: Discovering and starting a new book is energizing for me and a great way to recharge after a tiring workday.
Money: I strictly buy used books and wouldn’t dream of spending $20 on a new copy when I can wait a few months or a year to get it used for much less.
Of the four, how I was allocating my money stood out as being the least aligned with my passion. So I did a deep dive into my spending and when I compared my monthly spending on books to my spending in all other categories, I found that I spent more on alcohol than on reading material.
So guess what I decided to do?
NO! I didn’t stop drinking and use that money to buy books, I kept my booze spending exactly the same but decided that I would never again feel guilty about buying any book, used or new, at any time. This was one of many realizations and decisions that came from this deep dive into how I was deploying a key resource.
If you told 17-year-old me that he would eventually enjoy bookstore porn much more than actual porn, I’m not 100% certain he would have believed you.
How to examine each of your resource allocations:
Money: This one is the easiest to quantify, especially if you took the first step toward getting your financial shit together. Your data for the other three isn’t nearly as black and white, so take advantage of a rare opportunity for certainty by implementing a low-effort system for tracking your expenses.
Take some time to sit with the knowledge that how you spend your money demonstrates your values.
Look at how much you’re spending on each category and ask yourself whether it’s aligned with how important it is compared to everything else on the list.
As much as I love to talk about personal finance, I think your choices about how you allocate your money are less important than how you allocate the other three resources. Money ends up at the bottom of the list because for all intents and purposes, it is infinite.
There are skills you can learn and steps you can take to make more money than you can spend. But no one, no matter how much wealth they’ve developed, can create more time when their life has run its course. Sure, you can use money to purchase convenience, thus creating more free time but you can’t buy another day when your time is up. You can change how you slice it, but you can’t grow the size of the pie.
Time: Personal finance blogger/podcaster extraordinaire Paula Pant wrote a fantastic piece about what she learned when she tracked her time in 15 minute increments for one week. It’s well worth a read as is Laura Vanderkam’s book 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think. The upshot of both is the same – 168 hours/week is a shitload of hours and if you’ve never measured how you are spending your time, you will be delighted and horrified to find how much extra juice you can squeeze from 7 days.
Energy: Anyone who has made it past their mid-twenties or had kids can attest to the fact that energy is nowhere near an infinite resource. Pay keen attention to which circumstances/tasks/people drain your energy versus restore your energy. When you find yourself thinking “I know I should care about X, but I just don’t have anything left tonight”, do a quick diagnosis of what caused your battery to fade. For one month, record your energy level on a scale of 1-10 when you start work for the day, one hour after eating lunch, and when you get home from work.
Attention: I think of attention as the master resource because in many ways, how you choose to devote your attention determines how you end up using the other three resources. It’s sneaky because time can sometimes masquerade as attention – if you spend a ton of time on something, you must also be giving it your attention, right? Well maybe I’m a shitty father but if I’m being honest, I can’t say that Angell Elementary’s Spring 2018 production of The American Revolution captivated my full attention for its entire 90-minute run time.
“Of course I’m worthy of your undivided attention, I’m dressed slightly fancier than the rest of you and I have a gray five o’clock shadow.”
Partially because of its primacy over the other resources, attention can be the most difficult to objectively observe. I will spare you the umpteenth take on why meditation is a godsend/your life’s true purpose/the only way to fix capitalism/better than sex but I will say that a 10 minute daily meditation practice is by far the most effective way I’ve found to develop keen awareness of my attention.
If you’re like most people, what you will learn from doing this type of review will be surprising and perhaps a little disappointing. It may suggest that how you’ve defined yourself in the past no longer fits how you are living your life today. And that can be painful.
But the pain will help you cultivate intentionality in your actions. Becoming aware of how different your resource allocations are from where you want them to be is one of the best ways to motivate yourself to start making changes.
Become more conscious of how you are spending your time, your attention, your energy, and your money. Decide what is truly important to you and demonstrate it the only way that you can: through your actions.