Putting In The Work

There is very little in life that simply falls into your lap. Most of anything worth having is worth working for. But not everything you work hard for is worth having. Sometimes the cost is greater than the value of prize. But, how do you know which things are worth putting in the work for? What’s on each side of the scale?

Balancing Act

When I was young I started making Pros and Cons lists when I had a difficult decision to make. Articulating a clear problem and solution is important, but identifying that there are, indeed, cons to every solution is critical to making choices that will work in the long term.

A Fork Becomes A Hub

Often people talk about a fork in the road or the path less travelled as if there were only two choices to make. That’s rarely the case – even when picking ice cream flavors. One can always start with action or inaction. Then the choices branch off into which action is the choice. If inaction is the choice – there are always consequences so, then the options revolve around the fallout after inaction. The proverbial fork in the road become a hub with many more possibilities than two.

Butterflies And Multiverses

Pop culture has introduced us to the butterfly effect and the idea of the multiverse. Realistically speaking, we have all thought at one time or another how our lives would have been different if we had _____ or ____ instead. We may even have people close to us who made the choices we didn’t and can see how theirs lives are different from our own. On a small scale, fairly frequently I think about how much easier my professional career would have been had I taken the same typing class my friends took in high school. I thought I wouldn’t need it. I do. Every. Single. Day. And I still have to look at the keyboard most of the time.

Full Circle

All of this brings me back to my point. How can we ensure that we always make the right choices and focus hard work and effort on the right things?

We can’t.

But, we can do our best to weigh our options and learn from our mistakes. And in that, there is comfort because no experience is wasted unless we choose not to learn from it. No relationship is pointless unless we choose not to learn from it. So, we do our best to make right choices – doing our due diligence in researching our options and laying out the repercussions of each.

And, in the end, we work and we grow.