Are you living your best life or just surviving?

I chose to study economics, not because I was interested in the greater glory of the supply and demand curve but because I realized after a few years that the best way to understand human behavior was to watch how people behaved when managing a limited resource.

And … our two most limited resources in Western civilization are … time and money. How each of us handles these precious commodities often defines not only who our peers are and how we are seen by them but functionally who we are, or maybe more importantly, who we are becoming. Old dog adages aside, change is constant.

Abraham Maslow espoused that “man” has a hierarchy of needs that are core to our motivation. A series of goals that as each level is met the pursuer would attain a greater sense of well-being and presumably “happiness.” In his theoretically well-ordered life, our physical needs are met first, then safety, then love, then self-esteem … and once you get past all of that drama you can self-actualize and reach some mythical higher plane of existential joy or a great awakening. I am not sure anyone can really argue that the man was crazy, but that sounds more like a recipe for a sevenlayer dip than a complete life.

It's pretty obvious that in order to live your best life you need to survive it, but it's also very easy to get stuck in the survival part and forget to start living. That problem is certainly less acute here on the North Coast than say, Manhattan, but I see and hear it all the time: I will do it, just not now, but soon.

My dad has a saying, many of them actually: “Those who want enough will always have plenty, but those who want plenty will never have enough.” He isn't wrong; it's easy to make accumulation the end goal when in fact money is more a lubricant than an end. Given enough of it you can hire people to take on tasks (cleaning being a simple start) effectively buying time so you have more time to do X…

But what is X … and more importantly … WHEN is X?

We have all put off taking time off for one reason or another and some put it off perpetually. I have lost track of how many people I know that have foregone a much-needed vacation or turned down an adventure for any one of a number of reasons but usually it's some combination of time and money. Money aside, we will all run out of time, be it that short window with children (18 summers) or our own mortality, THAT currency expires. Which leads me to another paternal quote: “Pay yourself first.”

Don't wait, make the call, book the flight, set aside the money one dollar at a time, whatever it is and whatever it takes, make the time to take the time to Live Your Best Life.