Life Is Full of Trade-offs—Oct. 27

October 27, 2024

Sunday SAGe Newsletter Volume 6: Life Is Full of Trade-offs

Happy Sunday!

Here is this week’s installment of Sunday SAGe, an email communication that shares wellness inspiration from The Wellness Ethic to help people thrive.

This week’s focus is on the trade-offs that we make every day when we choose how we spend our precious time and resources. How can you intentionally create the most love and satisfaction in the upcoming week? What trade-offs are you willing to make for that noble objective?

Today we’ll build upon last week’s Sunday SAGe—Be Satisfied with Your Personal Pursuits.

Life Is Full of Trade-offs

An excerpt from The Wellness Ethic:

When you evaluate how you spend your time, you’ll likely reach three conclusions: There aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything you want to do, you don’t always get as much satisfaction out of an activity as you could, and you sometimes engage in unimportant activities that don’t bring joy.

Your time and resources are finite. That truth brings us back to one of my favorite Henry David Thoreau quotes: “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life, which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

Everything you choose to do has an opportunity cost—you could have decided to do something else that might have been more satisfying. Life is full of trade-offs. How can you make the right choices about what you do to boost satisfaction in your life?

When feasible, a SAGe (Self-Actualized Genius) would respond to that challenge by:

• Finding creative ways to make activities more satisfying

• Prioritizing the time and resources they allocate to activities that align with their life purpose and what they love, while spending less on everything else

• Moderating the time they spend on less satisfying activities

• Saying “no” to unimportant activities that don’t bring them happiness

• Accepting a lower standard of quality on unimportant activities if it saves time or money

• Outsourcing activities that need to be done but are stubbornly dissatisfying

By applying those principles to the activities you engage in, you’ll spend more time realizing the meaning of your life—to feel and share love.

What It Means

Life will pass by in a blur if we let it. A squandered day spending time doing things that don’t bring love into our lives can easily turn into a squandered week. A squandered week can turn into a lackluster month, year, or decade.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. You are empowered to say “no” to good opportunities because you want to say “yes” to something that will bring you more joy. You can break the habit of turning on TV or engaging in social media when you’re bored in favor of more satisfying activities, whether you enjoy going on a walk with a loved one, reading a riveting book, or immersing yourself in a hobby. You know what satisfies you.

You are empowered to live a satisfying life. What trade-offs are you willing to make to realize that promise?

Your Call to Action

Build upon last week’s Sunday SAGe objective of crafting a week full of experiences that engage your senses.

What trade-offs can you make this week to nurture the wonderful gift of your existence? If this was your last week on earth, how would you spend your time? Take a moment and reflect upon what you would do. For important commitments, like a job, how can you make them more satisfying? What can you say “no” to in favor of something you really want to do? What will bring you the most joy this week? Get excited about the possibilities, and then make it happen!

Live your life with intention every day. You’ll never regret it.

Have a satisfying week!