I was talking today with a friend of mine who is a very successful businessman, asking how he managed to balance his priorities. I mean, starting a business from scratch, and building it to a sustainable level, while balancing family life and finances to keep that startup going, sounds hard!

Basically, it comes back to the reason behind the activity. If the reasoning is big enough, then we prioritise around that. And it’s not money. E.g. if I am building a business to be able to increase our income to be able to retire my wife, then I want to do it as fast as possible to make that goal happen. So I cut out recreation in the short term, because the long term goal is more important.

If I am building a business “because I can”…then it will be very difficult to prioritise that business. The same goes for a degree…if you are just at university “because you can be”, it can be very hard to prioritise university work above everything else…because there is no ultimate goal. And if I don’t prioritise it, then it may take a lot longer to work properly (if at all), to the point where I just don’t see any reason in continuing!

So I guess it begs the question…why are you doing what you are doing? What is the ultimate goal you are striving for? And, once you have achived that goal, whats your next goal?

I was once told that the “why” we do something will make the “how” to do it easy. But knowing “how” to do something, does not automatically give us a reason to do it. I mean, think of all the ideas you have had, inventions, business ideas, improvements in other peoples businesses…you have got the “how”…but maybe have not implemented them because you have no “why”.