500 Words a Week - What are we willing to sacrifice?
"Your heroes aren’t gods, they’re just regular people who probably got good at one thing by neglecting literally everything else.” — Jason Pargin
This was a quote repeated on a podcast with Chris Williamson and Tim Ferris.
Another similar idea that has been brought up before on other podcasts, centres around this concept of what are you willing to sacrifice?
Think of people you admire who have gone on to achieve big things, they have done this at the expense of many other aspects of their life. We see the acclaim and the glory, but we don’t see the life away from this. We don’t get to see the quality of their relationships, or the quality of their thoughts. We tend to hold these people in high regard because of these achievements, and yet we only see the surface of them and their lives. Would we think the same if we knew beyond the surface?
On this topic of sacrifice, sometimes we don’t even realise what we are giving up. For instance, if we place our work on a pedestal. We don’t get to see or experience what it’s like at all those events we have missed. We don’t get to experience for ourselves what it’s like for those close to us when we are lost in our head contemplating work. We don’t get to understand what it might be like to be our partner who gets asked where you may be, to which they have to reply, “they are at work”. We don’t see or experience the effect this has on our partner or on those close to us in the moment.
A big reflection of mine from the last year was when I thought about the question: “Do I want to be known as the person who isn’t at events as they are at work?” Which has shed further light for me on this topic of what are we willing to sacrifice.
The point of this blog is recognizing what is it we are willing to sacrifice, and what we are not willingly to compromise on. It’s only by being clear on what we are not willing to compromise on do we prevent the little leaks from occurring. When we think of a leak, it begins with one little drop getting through, and slowly over time it can become something much bigger.
If you begin to let little things compromise what you previous said you wouldn’t compromise on, they begin to add up into bigger aspects. Before you know it, you are so far past your boundaries you forget what they were in the first place. We must start assessing our life. Assessing if we are truly happy with our day-to-day experience, and assessing are we currently making sacrifices, we once told ourselves we wouldn’t.
At a certain point in time, we must be clear on what we are willing to sacrifice and what we aren’t. Otherwise, life will make that decision for us, unbeknownst to ourselves. It’s only by zooming out and asking ourselves am I living a life I want to live, do we get closer to the answer of what are we unwilling to compromise on.
