Prioritize the Goals That Lead to Your Freedom
Everyone has their own definition of freedom. For me, I seek creative freedom because that makes me feel joyful and fulfilled — the two best feelings in the world. When I write, it’s a sense of freedom.
I say what I want and there’s no one standing in my way telling me what to do or what stories to share.
That freedom doesn’t come easy, though. You have to play tug of war with the world to get that freedom and you win the battle by prioritizing goals that lead you to that magical and wonderful place.
The goals I prioritize are ones that help me write. Those goals include reading every day, writing comments on social media at night, spending two hours a week finding creative images to use with my writing and consuming the work of other writers who are far better than me. These goals are non-negotiable for me.
You need to prioritize. If you can’t get to everything or do everything, that’s okay. — Julie Chen
There are two steps to prioritizing goals that lead to your freedom:
1. Set the priority
Decide what it is that leads you to that feeling of freedom. It might be running in a marathon, starring in a movie, traveling the world with your camera and documenting interesting moments, or making music.
Each of us has that one hobby, activity, moment or experience that makes us feel freedom. Freedom feels like there are no constraints, no one to tell you what to do, no rules and no limitations. Freedom is when you feel like yourself and you’re existing as a human in the vast world around you.
Whatever it is that gets you to that feeling, set it as your new priority from now on. Any goals that make up the DNA of your freedom, now become your number one priority
2. Be ridiculously thoughtful about small choices
This suggestion may not seem so obvious. You might think that your freedom comes down to lots of big decisions with huge words attached to them like vision, inspiring a million people or having a strategy.
From experience, prioritizing the goals that lead to your freedom is about all the small choices you may have taken for granted. Every day there are small choices that we make, which take away the space we need for the goals that lead to freedom.
Changing these small choices is how you get closer to the goal you need to focus on.
A few of those small choices from my life, as an example, are:
- Waking up an hour earlier on Saturday to sift through images for my writing
- Not having a few drinks after work on a Friday with colleagues and having soda water instead so that I can be fresh for the next day to write
- Having a slightly shorter shower in the morning so I have a few extra minutes before work to edit an article
- Reading a couple of extra books a year that leads to hundreds of ideas for blog posts
- Eating slightly healthier food during the week so that I have extra energy to write
- Exercising a few times a week so that my back feels better and doesn’t become sore while sitting or standing and trying to write
These don’t sound like the sort of choices that would lead one to focus on goals that could lead to the nirvana that is that feeling of freedom.
But it’s the small stuff. You gotta sweat the small stuff to make time and space for the big stuff like goals that lead to your freedom.
Every choice you are making is either getting you closer to that freedom or further away.
The easy part
Once you have felt what it’s like to experience that feeling of freedom, it becomes a lot easier to prioritize the goals that enable it.
You couldn’t pay me enough money to travel to a conference on a Saturday and give up a day of writing.
You’d probably have to arrest me, drive me to the conference, and shackle me to the chair. Even then, I’d be kicking and screaming like a two-year-old wanting to go back to my writing crib.
Getting started is always the hard part, but once you have tasted true freedom, you’ll want it for the rest of your life and you deserve it.
From now on, prioritize the goals that make up your freedom and be ridiculously conscious of the small choices you are making that are either supporting your freedom or taking it away.
Freedom is the best feeling in the world. Make your art, do your work, dance your version of the tango or write that song.
Make life whatever art you seek it to be and allow the goals that support that art to shine.