The Only Two Things You Need in Life
Simplify everything and live more freely
Life is a chaotic mess.
Every day you have thousands of things pulling on your mind, attention, focus, and beliefs. You can’t spend five minutes pondering without a notification turning you to your phone.
You can never have true peace or satisfaction if your life is so disorganized. This requires you to find priorities that you can focus all your time and attention on.
Ask most people and they will say things like health, personal development, family, friends, or a career as some of their most important priorities.
William Morris, an English designer, proposed two different priorities that apply to anyone’s lives. He once said,
“Give me love and work — these two only.”
Love and work; two priorities that are simple but profound. They cover the most important parts of anyone’s life.
If you make them a focus, your life will change in dramatic ways. You’ll be happier and higher achieving.
How to make love a priority
Put simply, making love a priority in your life means putting focus on relationships that matter.
People that spend time with family and friends are always happier and actually healthier.
The Grant Study, an incredibly famous study from Harvard, looked at peoples’ lives as they aged to see what created happy lives. This study analyzed many different lives, including US President John F. Kennedy.
When asked to concisely explain the study’s findings, longtime study director George Vaillant said,
“Happiness is love. Full stop”.
Years of study and careful medical, psychological, and social analysis finally discovered that happiness isn’t genetic or dependent upon wealth. It depends on the love you feel in your life.
Making your relationships a priority means setting aside time to spend with those you care about.
The best way spend time with others is by opening time. You can do that by taking a social media challenge.
Starting now (this very minute) decide on a day of the week when you are going to be able to check social media. Every other day of the week, completely avoid Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, and whatever else you have.
It will be challenging at first, but it’s a surefire way to open up more time in your life for the things that you care about.
How to make work a priority
“Never continue in a job you don’t enjoy. If you’re happy in what you’re doing, you’ll like yourself, you’ll have inner peace. And if you have that, along with physical health, you will have had more success than you could possibly have imagined.”
— Johnny Carson
Advice like Johnny Carson’s is pretty common, but very few people actually follow it.
Think about what would happen if everyone did what they love to do. Actually, it would probably be pretty bad for the world.
We’d have no sewage workers, no insurance agents, and no construction workers. Everyone would play professional sports or run their own tech company.
The advice can’t be followed exactly, but it can be followed generally. This doesn’t mean you have to quit your job to be an entrepreneur.
Stamp this into your brain: entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone. It has been glamorized, overhyped, and under-explained. It requires years of backbreaking work to maybe, just maybe, get a breakthrough.
Carson’s quote means you need to spend your time working on things you care about — as much as you can.
You may not be able to change jobs, but spend your free time working on things you actually care about. Start a podcast about investing. Write a book about dogs.
It doesn’t matter what you’re doing as long as it’s work. Most people think they need to come home from their 9–5 job and relax. The truth is, they’ll be more fulfilled if they can learn to work on what they care about.
A word on balance
One of the catchphrases in personal development is that people need to balance their lives. Nothing about this could be less true.
As Mel Robbins once said,
“Life is about growth and exploration, not achieving a fixed state of balance. You have a very limited time on earth to experience all that you can. Figuring out how to squeeze the most out of your family, work, and spirituality is your life’s purpose. Go do it.”
Focusing on getting everything equal will make you minimize your impact in every area of your life. The way to have great accomplishments in every area is by pushing harder in each of those areas.
When people try to balance their lives, they never talk about working even harder in certain areas. They only talk about spending less time on some things and more time on others.
This produces nothing but mediocrity. It means you are equally bad at everything rather than equally good at everything.
As Mel said, your challenge should be to be incredible at everything. Put work into the love you feel in your life. Spend time on your passions. Don’t waste time trying to make these things equal — spend your time trying to make them both great.
“Barefoot on a beach”
Life satisfaction is a fickle thing: trying too hard can make it worse, not better. The best way to improve your life is making it simple and unique to you.
The Greek musician Yanni once said,
“A simple life is good with me. I don’t need a whole lot. For me, a T-shirt, a pair of shorts, barefoot on a beach and I’m happy.”
That quote embodies the idea of this article. You can simplify your life down to love and work — two simple but all-encompassing things.
This does not mean you need to go live in the woods as a hermit to create a “simple life”.
It means you need to lose your complete connection to social media. You need to lose your obsession with online news and useless apps.
It means simplifying your life down to what really matters: the relationships you have and the work you do. It will be harder, but it will be much more fulfilling.
You’ll know you’ve reached a great point when you can look back at your life, the people you know, and the things you’ve done with complete satisfaction.
This will take a lifetime of effort, sacrificing any and all time-wasters. With no YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, or news, there will be more time for joy, peace, and simplicity.
