5 Ways to Become Stronger Than Your Excuses

 

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

My wife and I took our oldest daughter to one of our favorite restaurants for her 19th birthday. When the waiter took our order, he asked if we were leaving room for dessert.

Who asks if you’re leaving room for dessert before you’ve even eaten your food?

I told him it was a bit early to tell.

Then, he didn’t check back until we were well into our meal. Everything was going fine.

The next thing I knew, he was dropping the bill on our table.

No dessert order. No opportunity to consider my life choices (and ignore the voice in my head).

I found myself irritated. Why didn’t he ask again? I could have ordered separately, but that meant an extra receipt, and I didn’t want to deal with that.

My wife has worked for almost a decade as a health coach. (The irony of my present situation will become apparent momentarily.) One of the “models” they discuss often is the drama triangle. In a nutshell: there’s a hero, a victim, and a villain.

I was the victim.

I wanted dessert, but I didn’t get it because the waiter never asked me. Of course, it had nothing to do with my own indecision. I let the circumstances decide for me.

On the way home, the thought settled like a heavy fog on my brain. I do this in other areas of my life all the time, especially when it comes to my health.

I need to lose a significant amount of weight. In part, I need to lose it because it’s getting harder to put my socks on in the morning. I also just don’t feel healthy.

So, there I was, about to excuse ordering dessert because it was my daughter’s birthday. Really, though, if I’m being honest, I’ve been excusing a lot of things lately. “Just one more time” has become a daily mantra where cinnamon rolls and Boston cream pies are concerned. I’ve stopped exercising almost entirely — hence the weight gain.

I’ve used crazy amounts of work to justify my behavior.

The truth: I’ve let excuses run the show.

Most of us have had seasons of life where we let external forces, regardless of the size, dictate our behavior.

When faced with those circumstances, how do you stop that? How do you become stronger than your excuses?

Here are 5 ways that I hope to become stronger than my excuses. Check back in 30 days to see where I am.

1. Own the Decision Before the Moment Comes

Excuses thrive on weak decisions and indecision. The moment I told the waiter, “It’s too early to tell,” I gave up control. Had I already decided yes or no about dessert, I wouldn’t have felt frustrated when the bill arrived. The same applies to bigger choices — exercise, healthy eating, work habits. When decisions are made ahead of time, excuses don’t get a say. You do, of course, have to mean it when you make the decision.

Challenge the Story You’re Telling Yourself

Another maxim of my wife’s work, “Stop. Challenge. Choose.” We’re so good at telling ourselves stories to validate our actions. Excuses usually come wrapped in a story we’ve convinced ourselves is true. “I deserve this because it’s a special occasion.” “I’ll start fresh tomorrow.” “One time won’t hurt.” But is that really the truth? More often than not, these stories are justifications disguised as logic. If you can challenge the excuse before it takes hold, you can rewrite the story.

3. Set a Standard, Not Just a Goal

Goals are great. Standards are better. A goal says, “I want to lose weight.” A standard is more of a mental model that defines how we view ourselves and the world. A standard says, “I’m someone who makes healthy choices daily.” When you define who you are rather than just what you want, excuses start feeling like breaking a promise to yourself, and that’s a powerful motivator.

4. Stop Negotiating With Yourself

Excuses love to drag you into negotiations. “I’ll go to the gym tomorrow instead.” “I’ll eat better next week.” The more you entertain them, the more persuasive they get. The best way to win? Don’t start the conversation. When it’s time to act, act without opening the door for debate. It’s okay to tell the voice in your head to shut its pie hole sometimes.

5. Remember: Small Excuses Create Big Consequences

Eating dessert or skipping it wouldn’t have been a big deal in isolation, but habitual excuses add up. A few pounds here. A few missed runs there. I never hit the snooze button but some people do. Maybe that’s your “I missed my workout” vice. It’s pretty easy to think “just this once doesn’t matter,” but when you step back far enough, you can see that every excuse builds on the last one. Excuses gain strength when we give into them. The only way to stop them from piling up is to cut them off at the source.

Excuses are sneaky until they become the default behavior. That’s when the new bad habit becomes so hard to break. Eventually, excuses leave us feeling justified all the time which means we’re ignoring the long-term impact. The good news? You don’t have to win every battle, just the next one.

Bad habits are mostly formed through small excuses over time, so it makes sense that only small, deliberate choices can pull us back out.

Let the journey begin!

Penny Wise, Life Foolish

 

Photo by Dan Dennis on Unsplash

The top snap on my rain jacket clicked shut as thunder grumbled across the sky. I stepped out into the rain. I needed gas and the Costco across town was 25 cents cheaper per gallon than anywhere else —at least that’s what the radio said.

It took me 15 minutes to weave my way along the rain-soaked streets to where cars were lined up waiting to buy gas.

I guess I wasn’t the only one who got the message.

Twenty five minutes later, and feeling justified that I’d just saved $6.25 in gas in my fuel-hungry vehicle, I pulled away from the Costco. A quick glance in my rearview mirror told me Costco might run out of gas that day.

Cruising home, I was listening to my favorite trio sing my favorite song for probably the 500th time. Muscle memory was doing most of the work for me, right up until the moment the red and blue lights went on behind me.

Twenty minutes later, the officer handed me a ticket: 15 over the speed limit in what he called “dangerous conditions.”

My $6 savings on gas suddenly didn’t seem like much of a victory. I sat there in my car, staring at the ticket, and did the math. Six bucks saved, a fine twenty times that amount. My win such an obvious loss that even a toddler with a piggy bank could see it.

Why didn’t I consider that before the drive?

So why didn’t I see it before I made the drive?

Because, like most people, I love small wins, even when they don’t make any sense.

We chase discounts, buy five times as many of something because it’s buy one get one free, and feel triumphant finding loose pocket change, all while letting bigger financial leaks drain us dry. For some reason, it seems our brains aren’t wired to be rational about money. It seems the wiring’s set up to make us feel like we’re making smart choices, even when we aren’t.

Why Our Brains Fixate on Small Wins

This is a topic that psychologists call “mental accounting” which is basically categorizing money in ways that don’t make logical sense. Here’s an example: suppose you’re retired and on a fixed income. You dutifully review the coupons that come in the mail to make sure you’re saving 50 cents on your favorite box of cereal but then you forget to check on the fees on your retirement account that have been quietly creeping up for years.

It’s a strange phenomenon that small wins somehow feel tangible but the big financial mistakes almost feel abstract. That’s especially true when they’re happening in a near invisible way, like the retirement account example.

Basically, we celebrate the money we “save” because we can see it. A discount on a receipt. A coupon clipped and used. A few cents knocked off at the gas pump. That feels like winning.

So many times, the biggest financial losses don’t show up with flashing signs. They creep in quietly — hidden in fine print, automatic deductions, and choices that seem harmless at the moment.

We think we’re making smart financial moves, but what we don’t see is costing us way more than what we do.

The “Invisible” Costs We Ignore

Let’s ignore the expensive speeding ticket for a minute and just look at the hidden costs of driving across town to get gas. On a good day, my vehicle gets about 18 miles to the gallon. The trip to Costco was about 9 miles each way — an 18-mile round trip. That means I burned a gallon of gas just to buy gas. At roughly $4 per gallon, I spent $4 to save $6.25.

A net gain of $2.25.

That’s about what I spent on the soda I grabbed on my way into Costco.

Now my “savings” sit at zero.

And that’s just the obvious math. The truth is, the real losses are the ones we don’t see. You know, the ones that chip away at our wallets, time, and well-being without us even realizing it.

Take cheap products. We pat ourselves on the back for finding a bargain, but how often does the “deal” come back to bite us? The cheap shoes that fall apart in six months, forcing us to buy another pair. The budget tool that breaks the first time we need it for a real job. The “low-cost” airline ticket that ends up being anything but after baggage fees and seat selection charges. (I’m looking at you Allegiant.)

Then there’s the slow leak of money into the pit of forgotten subscriptions. The free trials that turn into auto-renewed bills. The memberships we barely use. The streaming services we keep because maybe we’ll watch something next month. We chase grocery coupons to save fifty cents but ignore the $50 slipping out of our accounts every month for things we don’t even think about.

The biggest hidden cost, though? Health.

Fast food is cheap, skipping the dentist feels harmless, and ignoring that nagging pain saves a copay. It’s easy to think those are smart financial choices — until the long-term consequences catch up. A single health crisis can erase years of “savings” in an instant.

And then there’s time — the cost we ignore the most.

Time Is Money, But We Waste It Freely

Alright, that’s an aphorism that’s absurdly popular in business. Time isn’t really money. Time is time and money is money. We trade time for money, but we also trade it for sleep, food, and everything else that makes life livable.

I once walked into my business partner’s office and found him in the final minutes of a brutal, three-hour battle with our accounting system. The problem? A one-cent discrepancy. He found it, fixed it, and felt victorious. The real cost? He’d just spent three hours solving a problem worth a single penny — at a cost of roughly 22,500 times its actual value to our business.

Sometimes, when you’re off by a penny, you just make a journal entry and move on. He could have done that in seconds. Instead, he poured valuable hours into a meaningless win.

That’s an extreme case, but we do this kind of thing all the time. We chase trivial savings, scroll endlessly on our phones, or burn hours in frustration over things that don’t matter. We know time is finite, yet we throw it away like it’s nothing.

Even though time isn’t money, it has value. Maybe it’s the only thing with real intrinsic value, because no matter how carefully we manage it, one day, it’ll run out for all of us.

The Fix: Stop Sweating the Small Stuff, Pay Attention to the Big Stuff

If a single bad decision added up to financial ruin, we’d all learn our lesson fast. But that’s not how it works. The real damage is just like death by a thousand paper cuts. Each one is a bit annoying, but mostly harmless on its own.

I spent an hour of my life driving across town to save six bucks on gas. At the time, it felt like a win. But zoom out, and it’s laughable. I burned time, spent money getting there, and in the end, walked away with nothing. Worse than nothing. $125 worse than that, in fact.

And, that’s exactly what we do with our finances, our energy, and our attention.

We hyper-focus on insignificant savings while ignoring the opportunities to improve our lives, financial and otherwise. We clip coupons and chase sales but don’t take the time to renegotiate our bills, review our retirement funds, or figure out why our money seems to vanish every month.

We obsess over short-term wins but ignore long-term impact.

If a grocery store had a sign that said, “Save 50 cents today, lose $500 over the next year!” we’d laugh and walk away. But that’s exactly what happens when we fixate on minor victories while the very real drains of insurance, bank fees, high-interest debt, and bad investments continue unchecked.

So what’s the fix?

Pay attention to the right things.

• If you want to cut costs, start with the big ones first: housing, cars, insurance, investment fees, and debt. There’s not another insurance company out there that needs to make more money.
• If you want to save time, eliminate distractions instead of “optimizing” low-value tasks.
• If you want to improve your health, don’t fixate on the price of organic lettuce while eating cheap junk food five times a week.

It’s not about trying harder. It’s about redirecting effort where it actually matters.

And that starts with rethinking what “saving money” really means.

Rethink What “Saving Money” Actually Means

The trip to Costco felt like a win. Saving six bucks felt smart.

Until I did the math.

Until I got the ticket.

Until I realized I’d wasted an hour, burned extra gas, and walked away with nothing but a lesson I should have already known.

That’s how bad financial decisions happen. They don’t feel bad in the moment.

We chase “deals” that aren’t really deals. We waste time in ways we’d never waste money. We fight battles that don’t need to be fought, whether it’s a one-cent accounting discrepancy or a drive across town for cheap gas.

If we really want to be better with money, we have to stop mistaking effort for progress.

Real financial wins and wins with out time come from fixing the leaks that actually matter.

The next time you’re faced with a small discount halfway across town, stop to ask yourself: Is this really a win, or just another distraction from the bigger picture?

Stories Can Last When You Wake From Your Dreams

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

The morning of May 1, 1852 likely would have dawned cool in Petilla de Aragón, Navarre, Spain, where Santiago Ramón y Cajal was born. Santi was both precocious and rebellious. In 1963, he was imprisoned for destroying his neighbor’s yard gate with his homemade cannon.

Santi was a talented painter, gymnast, and artist, but his father, hoping to instill some discipline, apprenticed him as a shoemaker and barber. What his father wanted for him, more than anything, was that Santi would go into medicine, which he eventually did.

In fact, Santi grew up to be what many consider to be the father of neuroscience. He used his incredible artistic skills to map neurons, revolutionizing our understanding of the brain. His dreams of being an artist didn’t die, in spite of his father’s attempts. Instead, they found an outlet; a different way to last.

In a different scientific discipline, and not too many years earlier, Augustin Fresnel worked to prove that light behaved as a wave. Physicists of his time dismissed his ideas, hanging onto the concept that light must travel as some kind of particle (wave and particle, as it turns out). Fresnel didn’t give up. He refined his theories and eventually created the Fresnel lens, an invention that modernized lighthouses and saved countless sailors. That wave theory became the foundation of modern optics.

Photo by Jack Anstey on Unsplash

The Winding Path to Success

Cajal and Fresnel’s childhood interests played into their later discoveries and inventions. They continued to nurture things they were passionate about, even when life (or others) tried to steer them elsewhere.

Their persistence invites us to ask ourselves the questions: What dreams or ideas have we abandoned too soon? How often do we assume that a closed door isn’t an indicator that another path is waiting?

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Like Cajal and Fresnel, we often have persistent ideas that won’t die. When I started my first company 16 years ago, I quickly gave up on it because finding clients was “too hard” and someone offered me a job that satisfied some of my very nerdy cravings to work in distribution and build software applications to help manage inventory and pricing.

I’ve continued to work for others for the last 15 years, but the idea for starting my own software development company has never died. Ask any of my family members, and they’ll tell you I’ve been talking about it for so long they had stopped believing it would ever happen.

During those 15 years, I’ve continued nurturing relationships and building skills that “all of a sudden” lent themselves to the development of my company and working with two of the best friends anyone could ask for.

You can reason that if I’d just stuck with things 16 years ago, I’d have had my first multi-million dollar exit from a software company.

The arrow of time makes that impossible to know for certain. I don’t think I was ready back then. I think I needed all the experiences and relationships that I’ve built in the last 15 years to get me to where I am today.

There were times (as recent as last week) when I’ve assumed that my story has ended because of the challenges of starting two companies when my children are getting to the age that they’re getting married, going to college, and having their own busy lives.

In Take the Long Way Home by Supertramp, there’s a refrain that says:

Does it feel that your life’s become a catastrophe?
Oh, it has to be, for you to grow, boy.
When you look through the years and see what you could have been.
Oh, what you might have been.

How often do we all assume that our stories are over rather than just taking a different route? Maybe that route looks like “the long way,” like a fifteen year detour before I created my software company.

If I chose, I could tell the story that my “life’s become a [work] catastrophe” of missed opportunity, or I can look at it the road I had to travel in order to get where I am today.

I held onto the dream without a clear vision of how it would play out in my life. That’s how it is for a lot of people in business and otherwise. There’s a winding road of experience and education that ultimately leads to where you want to be.

If you take a step back to examine your own life, do you see the same pattern? Do you have ideas of what you want to do or who you want to become that linger in the back of your mind?

I’m 46 years old which isn’t really old but I’m not in my twenties or thirties anymore. It’s easy for me to get caught in the trap of feeling like I’ve missed my shot, like the opportunity passed me by years ago and there’s no point in revisiting it now. I realized, however, that my old passions weren’t wasted. Just like Cajal and Fresnel (though on perhaps a smaller scale), I’ve been able to refine and repurpose my dreams to fit where I am today. If you’ll pardon the cliché statement, it’s almost as though the idea’s just been germinating for a long time, just waiting to take root.

I spent 15 years often thinking my only opportunity to build a software company had slipped through my fingers, only to realize that all those past experiences were just shaping me into someone far more capable of making it work. What if the same is true for you? What if the dreams you quietly set aside aren’t dead. What if they’re just waiting for you to grow into them?

We sometimes give into thinking that our ambitions are all-or-nothing. They’ll either happen when we first set out or they won’t happen at all. Life rarely works that way. Somehow, those things that are important to us have a tendency to stick with us, even when they take longer than we expected.

So here’s a question: What ideas have been loitering in the back of your mind like that cute person across the hall you’ve been meaning to talk to for years? What skills or ambitions have you dismissed as “not meant to be,” when maybe they were just waiting for their moment to shine with you?

Are You Resigned to Be No More Than You Are?

 

Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash

I don’t identify as a runner, but I’ve done plenty of it in my day. Statistically speaking, I’ve run more distance in one year than 99% of the total population will in their lifetime.

In 2023, I set a new personal record: more than 1,410 miles in one year. Those last 10 miles made the difference.

Science tells us that running is good for us. It also tells us that it increases the likelihood that our bodies will store fat because clearly we’re running from something.

A phrase from the biblical Proverbs comes to mind:

The wicked run away when no one is chasing them. — Proverbs 28:1

The real missed opportunity here is that it wasn’t Proverbs 26:2 (IFKYK). Pheidippides should have been born 300 years earlier.

Here’s the thing about running. When you run a lot, your body screams for calories. For the most part, the kinds of calories aren’t even that important. I mean, they are important, but also not. Long-distance runners are like calorie-burning factories. It’s probably obvious, but I’ll say it anyway, that there are different types of calories. A salad with a lot of protein sits very different on a 20-mile run than a bowl of ice cream with a lot of toppings.

After my personal record-setting year, I stopped running.

I gained 40 pounds.

Why?

Because I continued eating how I did when I was running up to 60 miles per week.

I added a lot of stress to my life as well; leaving a job I’ve been at for years and starting two companies.

Just under a week ago, my youngest child asked me, “Dad, when are you going to start running again?”

“Tomorrow,” I replied.

“Okay, and if you don’t run tomorrow, what’s the consequence? Will you add one mile to the next day’s run?”

“Sure.”

I didn’t really mean it, but then the next day I got a Discord message from him while I was at work.

“Did you run today?”

“No.”

“So, you’re going to run 6 miles tomorrow?”

“Sure,” I replied again, not really meaning it this time either.

The next day, he asked me again. I still hadn’t run, and I knew he wasn’t going to let it go.

So, I woke up the next morning and ran 8 miles. It took me as long as 13 miles used to take me, but I did it.

One day running doth not a runner make.

Or does it?

I was stuck, feeling stressed and over-eating every day.

Then, something changed. My son’s gentle, innocent reminders spurred something inside me.

This week, I have a goal to run at least 15 miles. It’s a far cry from where I was just over a year ago, but it’s a start in the right direction again. I don’t think I have a need to get back to running 40+ miles every week, but I do have a need to respect my body and shed the unwanted pounds.

We’re all faced with crossroad moments in our lives where we can choose to stay where we are or choose to change. Humans are creatures that crave change, no matter how small. Most people switch up what they wear on a daily basis for variety, we eat different foods, we go to places we’ve never been before, we say hello to people we’ve never met before. All of those things signal a desire to be a little different than we were before.

While daily, one percent improvement is impossible in any given thing over a lifetime, there are so many things we do in life where we can make tiny, almost imperceptible improvements.

We all know people who choose the path of no resistance and will Netflix themselves to death, fading into irrelevance because it’s harder than challenging yourself to be better.

The question I’ve been asking myself, even before my son declared himself my personal accountability partner, is whether I’m willing to be more than I am.

My decision to return to running is a life-altering decision, but I won’t see results overnight and certainly not all at once. Tomorrow, after I run, I might be lucky enough to be one pound lighter due to water loss on the run. If I’m a bit more careful about the calories I consume, it’ll be a tiny step forward; a choice that nudges me away from resignation to who I was.

For you, it might not be running. Maybe it’s finally fixing your diet, or calling a friend you’ve been meaning to check in on. Maybe it’s choosing to put your phone down for just five minutes and do something little that moves you in a direction you won’t regret.

The alternative? The slow fade into sameness, disappearing into a version of yourself that just never quite got around to changing.

What will you choose?

Problems Are a Bucket, Not a List

 

Photo by Galen Crout on Unsplash

I rolled over and looked at my clock.

2:42 am.

Nobody should be awake at that unholy hour, but I’d been lying there for a while, trying to think of a reason I couldn’t just go back to sleep already.

My Oura ring tracks my sleep. It regularly tells me how bad I am at getting an adequate amount which sometimes adds to my brain’s resistance to sleep.

3 hours, 21 minutes.

Too many nights lately, my ring has decided I’m just taking a long nap instead of actually, you know, sleeping.

My to-do list is long:

• 40 separate, work-related projects.
• A house that’s 21 years old and, let’s face it, they don’t build ’em like they used to.
• Exercise? Not happening.
• Eating right? Maybe next week.

My to-do list is like a rope made up of a thousand strands, each one frayed at the end, and I’m trying to snip them one at a time with a dull pair of those tiny travel-sewing-kit scissors.

Futile.

There’s no finish line, no moment when the last thing gets checked off, the last email gets sent, and I get to put my completed to do list in a drawer, never to be touched again. The list is always going to regenerate as fast (or faster) than I can cross things off, and some tasks burst onto the scene, demanding my attention, before I can even write them down. If you have a boss who understands prioritizing about as well as a four-year-old understands quantum mechanics then you know what I’m talking about.

The things to do and problems to solve are steady drips of water falling into a bucket that will never be emptied during a person’s life.

So. . .do we just give up? Surrender to the idea that we’ll never empty the bucket so what’s the point in trying?

Some people do.

For the rest of us, we have to embrace the truth that humans are wired to be problem-solving creatures. When we lack friction in our lives, we create it so we have something to solve.

An important, and often overlooked, aspect of this truth, however, is that we can’t do it all. It’s impossible to tackle every challenge, meet every opportunity, and do all the things.

So we have to choose.

And sometimes, the choice paralyzes us, and it’s not because we’re incapable, but because the sheer number of competing priorities makes it really hard to decide which thing is actually the most important.

In a world overrun with hacks, frameworks, gurus, and efficiency, we’ve been conditioned to believe there’s a perfect system for solving all our problems. Every productivity guru has the method for getting things done. Every business book has the strategy for prioritizing what matters. Every leadership coach has the secret to time management.

I understand that businesses need efficiency to be profitable. But there’s a vast difference between being profitable and maximizing profit at the expense of everything else. At some point, efficiency turns into extraction (exploitation?) where people stop being people. They become gears in the profit machine; expendable parts that can be tossed out when the numbers don’t align. That’s why the C-suite gets golden parachutes while hundreds of thousands lose their jobs. That’s why “doing more with less” is just corporate-speak for “squeeze harder.”

And maybe that’s why we all feel so exhausted.

So, what do we do?

We stop chasing the impossible.

We stop treating “getting everything done” as the goal because that goal is a mirage; one that is always moving out ahead of us no matter how close we think we’re getting. Instead, we redefine success. We accept that some things will not get done, and that it’s okay. The real challenge isn’t how to do more, it’s how to be okay with doing enough.

1. Identify What Actually Matters

Not everything on your list deserves your attention. So many things are urgent but meaningless, feel important but aren’t, or don’t need to be done at all. The trick is figuring out which is which.

Here’s a simple exercise:

• What would happen if you didn’t do the thing? (If the answer is “nothing,” move on.)
• Who are you really doing this for? (If it’s for appearances rather than necessity, reconsider.)
• Will this matter in a week? A month? A year? (If not, why stress over it now?)

Did you know that the plural of priority wasn’t even used much until almost 1940, and prior to the 1900s it wasn’t even a word? If everything feels like a priority then nothing is. You can’t find more time, try as you might. You just have to actively decide what’s worth your time.

2. Let Go of the “Perfect System” Illusion

The productivity world sells the idea (for 15% off if you buy today) that if you just find the right system, you’ll finally get control over your time. Spoiler alert: no system will save you.

There’s no planner, no time-blocking strategy, no AI assistant that will magically make it all fit into 16 to 20 waking-hours a day. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you can stop wasting energy trying to optimize every minute of your life like you’re a machine.

Instead of obsessing over “perfect efficiency,” focus on effective sufficiency which is doing what matters most, and being okay with leaving some things undone. Like I just told my nine-year old son, you don’t have to be perfect. Most of the time, adequate is all you need.

3. Redefine Success in a Way That Doesn’t Drain You

If success is checking every box, you will never feel successful. If success is progress on what matters, suddenly, you’re winning.

• If you worked on one meaningful project today, that’s a win.
• If you took care of yourself in a way that lets you keep going tomorrow, that’s a win.
• If you spent time with people you care about instead of squeezing in “just one more task,” that’s a win.
• If you read a few pages in a good book, that’s a win.

At the end of the day, no one will remember how many emails you answered. They’ll remember how you showed up in their lives.

4. Accept That Rest Is Part of the Work

We’ve been conditioned to believe that rest is a luxury, when in reality, it’s fuel. Burnout doesn’t happen because people are weak. It happens because we’re not designed to function at full speed indefinitely. Even machines require downtime.

Because the to-do list is never ending, stopping for a moment is really the only way to keep going. A car with an empty gas tank doesn’t get anywhere.

Neither do you.

Give Yourself Permission to Let Go

The list will never be finished. The bucket will never be empty. And that’s okay.

Your job isn’t to do all the things. It’s to do the things that matter and to have a life worth living in the process.

So, go ahead and close the laptop and just enjoy that Hallmark movie with your spouse. Put the list down, and back up slowly. Remind yourself that the world won’t crumble if you take a breath. In fact, your world might crumble if you don’t take time to breathe.

Just... breathe.