Setting Your Priorities(Part 1)

The first and most important step toward achieving your passions is setting your priorities. I know that this sounds like something coming out of a motivational guidebook, and to be honest it kind of is, but that doesn't make it any less important for you. Lets' face it, most of the people who write those books do it in their spare time while working full-time jobs, so they have a lot of experience with being busy. Setting your priorities simply means choosing which activities are more important to you and making those things a priority. I know what you are thinking, on Monday I said that you could have it all, and now I am telling you that you have to choose, so let me explain:

I first discovered the importance of this step during my second semester as a freshman in college. During high school, I rarely had to choose between two things that were important for me. I had the fall to play soccer, the winter to ski, the summer to raft, kayak, and hike, and somehow, school just seemed to work with all of those activities. There were not a lot of conflicts in my schedule. However, as a Freshman at BYU, I found myself wanting to do more activities more often. With the indoor practice fields, I could play soccer all winter long. Now that I was only 30 minutes away from the closest ski hill, I decided that I wanted to go skiing 3 or 4 times a week. Oh, and it turns out school work is a little bit more difficult at BYU than it was at my high school. To sum it all up, my schedule quickly became a nightmare. On many nights, I wouldn't get home until 10:30 only to go straight to bed (well, actually it took a lot longer to go to bed) and wake up the next morning at 7:00.

As you can imagine, after several weeks of doing this, I had had enough. The activities that I used to love, lost a lot of their excitement, and I constantly felt tired and beaten down, so I decided that I would have to change something. Essentially, I sat down and created a list of everything that is important to me. Once I had the list, it was pretty easy for me to make adjustments. The ones at the top of the list had first priority, and whenever there was a conflict between two events, I simply picked the event that was higher on my list. Before I did this, I frequently tried to juggle conflicting events, and it never worked. Once I decided what was most important for me, it became easy to give up certain activities, and to tell the truth, after I did this, I found that I had more time not only to do those things at the top of my priority list, but also to enjoy everything on my list, because I no longer wasted my time trying to figure out what I was going to do.

You Can Have it all

The number one thing that college kids, and almost all other working adults for that matter, need to remind themselves is that they can have it all, they just can't have as much of all of it as they might want. That statement is probably confusing to most of you reading this post, so let me explain to all of you what I mean. You can have time to do everything you want. Even the most devout workaholics only work 80 hours a week (I know that that is probably the first time that you have hear the words only and work 80 hours in the same sentence). Now don't get me wrong, that's a killer load, but that means that even if you are married to your job, or your school work if you are a student, you still have 32 hours a week to do whatever you want after you account for 8 hours of sleep a night.

The good news is that most people do not work 80 hours a work, and most students do not need to spend anywhere near 80 hours a week working and studying, even with part-time work and difficult course loads. However, even though they could have a lot of time to pursue the things they love, most people allow work and school to become their entire life. So clearly, it is not exactly how much free time we have that makes the biggest difference but rather what we do with that free time that matters. I believe that there are a few simple things that we all can practice that will allow you to have more time to pursue the things that you love, and I will be introducing them on a daily basis to help all of you live your passions.

Keeping a Balance

During my first year of college, I began to notice that most of the students that I knew had divided themselves into two groups: those who decided that college was made to have fun, so they forgot about everything except for having fun, and then there were those who locked themselves in their rooms all day in an effort to get good grades. I wanted to make the most out of college, and I had goals to do well in school and get good grades, but I also knew that I would go crazy if I didn't get outdoors and explore a little. In my first semester, I felt torn between two worlds.

Fortunately, I was committed to not forgetting my passions as a student, and for the past three years, I have been able to ski two or three times a week, enjoy the outdoors, spend time with friends and family, and do well in school. As I have worked to make this possible in my life, I have learned a lot of valuable lessons of what to do and what not to do, and I have realized that there are many people who struggle to balance all of their goals and their passions. This blog is for those people who are struggling to balance all of the pressures in their lives. I hope to be able to help you take care of your responsibilities and still find time to enjoy your passions.