You can have anything you want; you just can’t have everything you want (at once).

 You can have anything you want; you just can’t have everything you want (at once). 

I think about this topic a lot. This idea of figuring out how to determine and make priority those things we really want in life. We are all pulled in many different directions – family, careers, hobbies, friendships, wellness, the list goes on. With so much asking for our attention, the question really becomes, what do we want? If we can’t have everything, we must decide what it is that we actually want. 

When I wrote my new year’s goals this past weekend, I listed seven categories of life that I was resolving to focus on. My resolutions fell into the categories of Family, Career, Spiritual, Financial, Social, Physical, and Intellectual. Within each of those categories, I wrote down goals I wanted to achieve and areas I wanted to focus on. Okay, you can probably already tell how this is a lot of goals. It was a good exercise, and beautiful to reflect on those areas of life. I enjoyed the practice of viewing goals in this way, and it provided me clarity on where it is I want to home in on in 2022. But what was apparent on day one of executing my goals, is that it was just too much to do all at once.  I don’t have the time, energy, or resources to accomplish everything I want all at once. 

This concept, the idea that we can’t have everything, also applies to our finances. A lot of us live on a certain income. We might receive a paycheck every week, every other week, or we may pay ourselves a fixed amount from our businesses. And for a lot of people, this is it. There is not an infinite well of money pouring to them. We must live on this set amount of money we earn. With this fixed income, we have to ask the same question I posed earlier: If we can’t have everything we want, what do we actually want? 

As an exercise, I like to ask my clients to think about having a single cup of water, just 8 ounces, and that water must last them for the next three days. If you were in this situation, what would you do with that water? Would you wash your hands? Would you water your plants? Would you scrub the floors? No way! You would drink the water to stay alive. The water is a finite resource. You would not waste it because it is more important to you to continue living than to use the water for something else. 

The example with the water is obvious. Yet, our fixed incomes pose the same challenge, and it is much less obvious for most people to determine how to use it. When you begin to think of income as a finite resource, can you start to determine and reprioritize how you want to use it? 

When we decide that we will live on the fixed amount of income, we open ourselves up to a beautiful challenge: how do we maximize our lives with this resource we have? Are we using it in the best way possible? Are we using it for things that are helping us create the life we want? What is the life we want? Answering these questions forces us to assess our values. 

Getting the gentle reminder that my time is limited, I must review my new year’s goals – which goals can I accomplish with my time, energy, and resources? Which of those goals will help me create the life that I want? And what is the life I want? I can accomplish any one of the goals I wrote down, but I likely cannot accomplish all of them (at once). Perhaps, I can structure them so that achieving some now will help me achieve the others later.