“Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter,” Francis Chan.  I spent my life looking for accolades trying to be the best at everything.  It isn’t so much that the things I tried to succeed at didn’t matter, it was a question of whether or not it mattered to me.  See, everything we do has value, everything people have interest in has value and purpose—that doesn’t mean it holds the same value and purpose to all of us.  we need to find the things that matter to us, the things that speak to our souls, the things that drive us and help us find our way to who we are. We aren’t all meant to do the same thing so the things that interest us and speak to us are the things we need to decide whether or not that have importance to us, if they have enough significance to give us purpose and meaning.  Succeeding at everything is not only impossible, it’s not practical, and it isn’t what we really want.  We want to explore the possibilities of what speaks to us, what sparks our interests.  So it doesn’t matter what we value in regards to personal interest, if it HAS value to us then it is meant for us to take time to explore it rather than regret never going after something we wanted.  It doesn’t matter if we fail, we need to know we took our chance and did the best we could with it rather than wonder what if…

Spending time on things that don’t matter is one of the most painful realizations and has personally led to a lot of regret in my life.  I’ve done what I thought I was supposed to for most of my life—what I thought people wanted, what I was told people wanted and what my goals should be.  And I did REALLY well at what people said I should do.  I checked all those boxes and a few things happened: I couldn’t seem to check all the boxes because there was always another one, and I truly never felt fulfilled so I constantly looked for other boxes to check—on top of that I didn’t know how to create my own boxes, how to acknowledge what I wanted for myself.  I thought I had to get through the infinite checklist of what other people told me to do first.  As I got older it was easier and easier to find things to add to that list because there were more and more things that people around me didn’t seem to want to do that I was taught needed to be done.  So I did those tasks for them too.  I started to rise in some ranks—slowly—but I still wasn’t getting what I thought I would, what I was promised.  And I woke up realizing that what I had, the things weren’t what I was really looking for.  And I didn’t know how to find what really mattered to me.

It’s been a slow unbecoming and unraveling of my life (perhaps an unpeeling/unpacking) that has led me to start looking at what matters the most to me.  The core values of love and my family have never changed—so I know that is something that is all me.  I went through some friendships where they couldn’t stand their family and I was often the voice of reason for at least seeing both sides of it.  But there are things I realize that as a human, as anyone trying to succeed in society, we need to know how to do them for ourselves—people can’t tell us what to do our entire lives without us either resenting them or needing them for everything.  No one has the energy to tell us what to do all the time and we will eventually regret what we didn’t do.  We are all given the same 24 hours every day but we don’t all have the same amount of days so it is important to find a way to prioritize what matters the most to us.  Find where we want to succeed and what matters to us—and even what success means to us.  Don’t let our lives pass us by checking boxes that don’t matter to us personally—create our own boxes.