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Are you filling your day with productive and meaningful actions that inspire you or with unproductive distractions that are bringing you frustration and despair?
In case you have not yet fully contemplated the illusive, obvious truth about your life, your whole life will involve working. So, some form of working is here to stay. You will spend most of your waking hours doing some degree or kind of work, either at home or in some form of more classical working environment. Your work will be an all-encompassing and inescapable fact of your personal and professional life, and it may take on many forms during different ages or stages of your evolution. Your fulfillment in life will be proportionate to the quality and quantity of your work. You will be solving problems, answering questions, tackling challenges, overcoming obstacles, filling needs, organizing chaos or simply moving objects for yourself and others the rest of your life, most every day of your life. If you don’t fill your life with challenging work that inspires you, your life can become filled with working challenges that don’t.
The quality and quantity of your inspiring, yet challenging, work will partly decide the value of your time and the overall level of your fulfillment in life. Your work, though, can be inspiring or despairing, productive or unproductive, fulfilling or unfulfilling. It is all up to you and your attitude or perception. You can do what you love and love what you do, or not. When you do inspiring and meaningful work, it will energize you and make you feel youthful or even ageless. When you don’t, it will drain you and make you feel prematurely old. As one billionaire once said, “Find out how to do the work you love to do and you will seldom, if ever, perceive your work as work, ever again.” You will love to work. And even ‘hard’ work will feel like you are hardly working.
Your work can be one of your greatest satisfactions and allies in life, or become one of your most frustrating enemies. And, if you don’t have your body or money working wisely for you, you may be unwisely using up your valuable quota of time. When you use your time wisely and make every day count by doing the work that is truly important and meaningful and that genuinely inspires you, you are left with more energy and time to spare. You will have more energy at the end of the day than when you started. Prioritizing your daily working actions and delegating other lower priority actions to others more qualified is wise. Working efficiently and effectively involves doing the right job and doing the job right and achieving results that productively serve and inspire others. We are here to serve and be served and undergo sustainable fair exchange.
Since your time is irreplaceable, what is your time worth? You have 60 seconds a minute, 60 minutes per hour, 24 hours per day, 168 hours per week, 52 weeks per year. How are you filling your time? Your time is your most precious resource. Wasting your time could be viewed as actually wasting your life. How many more years do you intend to live? What actions of service or forms of work do you intend to fulfill your remaining time with? Are you making the most of the remaining minutes, hours, days, weeks, months or years of this brief and mortal life? Are you masterfully pre-planning your life, taking command and becoming captain of your ship and a foretelling prophet of your own future destiny? Without sound planning, the efficiency and effectivenes s of your work can become diminished and you can become scattered and stagnate. Are you willing to transcend your instant or immediate gratifications for your long-term vision of service and reward to build momentum instead of becoming bogged down with inertia?
Any aspect of your work that you choose not todirect and govern, will govern you. You can become a slave to unfulfilling work or become your work’s fulfilling master.
Working wisely means wisely working. Wisely working means achieving your primary tasks at hand, fulfilling your chief aim over time and continually producing advantaged results. You can work less and accomplish more by working according to your highest priorities, or work more and accomplish less by working according to your lowest. Your ABC’s raise your work output and self-worth and your XYZ’s lower them. Are your work priorities truly yours? Make sure they are not based on the injected values or intentions of others. Your final decisions on your long-term working goals must truly come from within. Since work expands to fill the time allotted, it is wise to allot only the time it takes to do the work through concentrated effort, and then to delegate all lower priorities to others so as to remain focused on high priorities and not become distracted or scattered. Your priority is to solve problems, to work, to be of service to others and to initiate chain reactions of wise working behaviors throughout society, and to live an extraordinary life in return.
When you know what is truly valuable to you, your true higher values or priorities, and you set sail toward your chief aim or most meaningful mission, vision or objective, you awaken your natural born love for working and serving. You activate your inner leader and you exemplify an inspired working life. You spontaneously become inspired from within to fulfill your higher values. No one will ever have to outwardly motivate or remind you to get up and do the work that is most meaningful to you. You won’t be able to wait to get up and do what is truly most important to you — your inspired work and service for the world — and in turn the world won’t be able to wait to get your service.
Your highest value or chief aim in life is your key to working wisely and wisely working. It is the most meaningful and purposeful action you can ever do.
You will do it most effectively and efficiently and with the most gratitude, love, inspiration and enthusiasm, which are the four cardinal feelings of self-mastery, achievement and growth. When you have clear purposeful intentions and live congruently, or in alignment with your highest values or priorities, you automatically begin to walk your talk and expand the space and time horizons of your thinking and actions to fulfill your working dreams and live longer doing so. You can then focus on solution orientation more than problem dwelling and plant flowers in the garden of your working mind instead of redundantly pulling weeds. You’ll desire to wear out more than rust out. There is nothing wrong with retirement as long as it does not get in the way of your work – your most meaningful service to others that inspires you most. Doing today’s most important tasks today instead of today’s tasks tomorrow is the key to a long and more fulfilling working life. So decide now what your highest values and priorities are and wisely get to work. You still have a great life and vast world of loved ones to serve.
Dr. John Demartini is a human behavioral specialist, educator, internationally published author, consultant and founder of the Demartini Institute.
