Success often comes down to priorities, why have only a few of us decided we have them?
Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter
I asked many people over new years what they would like to do in ten years. I got a lot of ‘I don’t know…’ answers.
I know one woman who wants to move to France. She’s wanted to move there for a number of years. I asked her if she would make it there by 2020, and she wasn’t sure if that was enough time. She’ll be nearly 60 in 2020.
I told her she could do it in less than a year.
Why not just go to France, if that’s where you want to be?
Many people spend so much time talking about what they wish they had the will power to achieve. If these people spent half as long talking and more time doing the work to get them to their goal every single day, eventually they might just get there.
Achieving your goals ultimately comes down to focusing on your priorities. However, many people seek simply to avoid setting them.
Instead of starting a business, a person continues to work at Starbucks.
Instead of traveling the world, a person buys an SUV.
It’s also important to realize when you have handicapped yourself by using a ‘when this happens, then I’ll do this.’ statement. Like, ‘if only I had a million dollars, I’d start my own business and travel the world!’
Realistically you’ll never earn a million dollars, so you’ll never achieve your dream.
My biggest goal right now is to support myself by writing this blog. This naturally means that my daily focus is writing incredibly valuable articles for this blog.
It is absolutely essential that you take a moment and think about what your ultimate goal is, in this moment, and prioritize it. Make this single goal the most important activity of every day. — Even if you are working at Starbucks, your day doesn’t revolve around Starbucks. It’s just where you go to work, but meanwhile your brain is thinking about photography.
How to focus on your priorities to achieve greater success.
- Select one overall priority that you care about intrinsically.
- Break down the priority into manageable steps that are actionable.
- Spend at least an hour (more if you can) every day working towards it.
- Be accountable. Tell everyone you’re moving to France by 2011.
- Map your progress in the short term and what you’ve achieved in the longer term.
- Reward yourself when you’ve made sufficient progress.
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It’s okay to have other interests, but only give yourself one priority.
Now, there’s no reason why you can’t have multiple interests (minor priorities) at any one time, but I think it’s important to just focus on one over-arching priority. If you have seventeen priorities it’s really hard to find the time to do one thing every day to further them.
Jane, left a comment a few days ago listing her many priorities: writing, photography, web design, and teaching.
She recognized that she couldn’t focus on all of them at once, and she is totally right. You can’t master all of these things at one time. I recommended that she pick one to work towards mastering, before investing too much time in the others.
But it is also worth noting that she can be all of these things that she listed.
In fact, all of these skills compliment each other in significant ways. A web designer/photographer/writer/teacher is a very different professional than just a photographer. A photographer who cannot write will have difficulty communicating with her subjects and gathering contacts. If she cannot design a website, she will have to pay a web designer to put her work online. Teaching photography is one of the best ways a photographer can network with clients and other photographers.
Priorities change over time.
At various times in my own life I’ve invested thousands of hours in the very same skills Jane listed. Earlier in my life (probably between the ages of 12-16) I wanted to be a web designer, so I built many websites. Later I choose to concentrate on photography (18-23), so I spent thousands of hours taking photos. This eventually led to a job as a photo editor (21-24) where I spent thousands more hours making photos look brilliant on stories which were published on websites.
It’s perfectly acceptable to shift your priorities, and I think it’s only natural that they will change over time.
We are human beings, not robots, and our interests morph as we achieve various levels of skill. If you force yourself to stick with one path, when you really want to change it, then you’ll end up being incredibly unhappy.
Let the other priorities become less important until you’ve attained some level of mastery in the first.
I’ve spent many years with maintaining writing as passive activity, while I was focusing on art directing and photography.
I didn’t stress about writing. I still wrote as often as possible, but not on a schedule. Two summers ago I filled two Moleskins with a novel, without even making it a priority. That novel still isn’t a priority, but it was a big passive step towards being a better writer, as I was focusing on larger priorities.
Now that writing is my ultimate focus, all of that passive work behind the scenes has come to the forefront. The pieces are fitting together, and the results I’m seeing are extraordinary.
What are your priorities? How are you working towards them?
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How to work towards a job you can believe in.
Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.
I’ve been writing exclusively about The Minimalist Workweek for the last couple of days. If you haven’t read these articles already, I definitely suggest that you do. On Monday I listed 21 ways to live a more minimalist workweek, on Wednesday Dave Damron taught us how to organize our drawers.
Today I’ve written a short article which I hope will help you deal with a subject that many of us face every day…
How do you work towards a job or career that you can really believe in?
An incredible amount of people are forced to work jobs that are slowly killing their souls. Nothing is worse than waking up every morning dreading the 8 to 10 hours you have to spend working a job that you hate.
We exist in a time when starting your own business has never been easier. Twitter and Facebook have made connecting with people instantaneous and free.
Now is the time to make the change in our lives and be able to do a job that really excites us.
It’s time to stop waiting, and cash in on your innate talent.
How to seize this moment and pursue your dreams now.
- Just quit. If you hate your job, and you have some money in the bank, just quit. Trust me, you will find a way to survive. If you don’t, there is always food stamps. This is harder for people who have to support other people, and I acknowledge that. But, if you’re young and not in too much debt, just get out and start having an adventure.
- Work on your passion from 7pm-2am. Maybe you can’t quit right now, but there are more than enough hours in the day to work towards your goals. Turn off the television and start making your dream come true. It’s easy to get into the habit of coming home from work and just sitting on the couch. Don’t let yourself fall into this trap, if you really want to make meaningful changes in your life, you need to force yourself to do some hard work on your actual goals.
- Make one small meaningful step per day. Put aside an hour to make a tiny contribution to your new career goals. If you write one 1500 word blog post a day about the field you want to enter, by the end of a year you will have written 546,000 words. That’s a couple of books worth of writing. If you write about what you want to become every day for a year, there’s no way you can’t become an expert on the subject.
- Spend ten hours a week trying to automate income. There are many ways to automate income these days. Start selling a product online, and give people who help you sell it 50% commission. Write a blog every day and use sell someone else’s product via affiliate services. These are some of the ways that I automate my income, but there are many more. A good resource on income automation is Timothy Ferris’s The 4 Hour Workweek.
- Learn everything you can about your passion. When I first quit my job in July, I had no idea what I was doing. I flew to Portland, and started doing yoga every day, but I also started reading every day. Over the course of 2 weeks I read every important book on business and marketing in Powell’s. Think about how you can max-out the knowledge you have on a particular subject. There’s no reason why you can’t be an expert in the career you want to pursue, so read every book on it now. You’ll be surprised how many ideas and plans can result from simply reading.
- Go back to school. Education is priceless, it also can be a great transition point. Apply to grad school, or go to college for the first time. Yes, it might be challenging, yes you might get into a ton of debt. The price you pay will pay back boatloads with the ideas and people that you will meet in the field you wish to pursue.
- Practice makes perfect. Malcolm Gladwell noted in Outliers that you need at least 10,000 hours to become a master. What can do you do to get in your 10,000 hours of practice in on your passion? –I might have read the entire business and marketing section at Powell’s in two weeks, but I’ve been publishing on the internet since I was twelve years old. This is a HUGE advantage over people who have just started. How can you leverage your existing experience in your new career?
- Work for free. The modern economy (especially on the web) rewards people who give their work away for free. Think of ways that you can give to people. Are you an excellent writer? Consider writing a profile on one remarkable person a week, to help them get exposure. Do you want to build cars? Maybe you can help your friends and family maintain theirs for free. Do you want to be a chef? Have one person over for dinner every night for a year, by the end of that year you’ll have at least 300 clients for your restaurant. It’s so important to give as much as you can as you’re building skills and a reputation. When I was becoming a photographer I shot thousands of free photographs for people, this gave me the experience I needed to shoot good photos, and later people came back to me with paying gigs.
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Hopefully one of these ideas will help you achieve your dreams.
If you can think of more ways to follow your passion, I’d love if you could share them in the comments.
This is a guest post written by Dave Damron of The Minimalist Path.
On the path to becoming a minimalist, it’s important not to overlook your desk drawers.
I have already discussed my issues with desks and desktops over at The Minimalist Path, but drawers are another clutter-control area that has been glossed over many times.
Drawers, you ask?! Yes, drawers. They hide away the stuff we want to ignore for days, months, and even years. Drawers are an intimate part of the procrastination in all of our lives.
Drawers are the devil. Okay, maybe not the devil, but they can be a great way to hide things that you actually need to deal with, or part with.
I currently have two drawers in my desk and they only hold writing tools, scratch paper and computer/electronic cables. Other than those objects, these drawers are empty.
I do not have an abundence of unorganized old bills or miscellaneous love letters from Jennifer Aniston and Jessica Biel. I actually keep the latter under my pillow, but that is a discussion for a different post.
Drawers were the arch-nemesis of my attempts to organize at work, when I worked at a 9-5. I always just threw random papers from the boss into them and rarely acknowledged their presence until the last minute. Unfortunately, during my almost 2 year tenure in my 9-5, I never learned from my clutter until the end.
But since then I’ve developed a number of helpful solutions to the proverbial drawer problem.
I would love to help you minimize your workplace by attacking those drawers with all your might.
6 Ways to take control of your drawer situation.
continue reading…
21 ways to save yourself from workplace oblivion.
Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter
This is the first of a series of three articles on minimalist workplace philosophy. Check back on Wednesday for a guest post by David Damron of The Minimalist Path.
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Metaphor for workplace oblivion.
Americans work too much. Did you know that the average American worker spends 47.1 hours at the office per week? Some even work up to 70 hours. That’s insane, we’re killing ourselves. No wonder we never have time to cook breakfast and dinner, let alone exercise and spend time with our families.
The great recession has exacerbated this problem, because people are afraid they’ll be laid off if they don’t spend extra hours on the job.
The problem with delayed gratification.
The worst part about this whole equation is that we’re expected to slave away our youth for a far off goal of someday retiring to a nice beach somewhere when we hit our 70′s.
I’ve got some news for you, you probably won’t make it to 70 working 70 hours a week.
Now, I’m not saying you should quit working. Everyone needs to work in order to make money to survive, but an outrageous amount of time at the office is a good sign that you are working in a fear-based environment.
It’s time to start working less.
continue reading…
Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter

Far Beyond The Stars is a series of stories about how to achieve freedom. That much needs to be clear. When I write these stories, the immediate product may be a clean kitchen counter or an uncluttered schedule; the ultimate goal is a life where none of that matters anymore.
I believe were at a moment in time when we are poised to make a huge change in the way we humans inhabit our lives and our world.
We are on the verge of reclaiming our nomadic heritage.
After hundreds of years of having to settle, forced to rely on agriculture to sustain ourselves and then made to work in factories, we’re finally coming into an age where none of that matters anymore.
We can live anywhere, work from anywhere, and do whatever we like. We’ve broken mass media’s hold on our decisions, our idea production — any of us can start creating with a reasonable expectation that we will be able make a living from our passion.
This is what Timothy Ferriss wrote about in the 4 hour work week.
This is what Seth Godin wrote about in Tribes.
I’m living this life right now, and from what I’ve seen so far of the flexibility and the possibility for growth, it’s pretty awesome.
Chris Guillebeau is living this life
Tammy Strobel is living this life
Colin Wright is living this life
And countless others, too many to name.
You can live this life too.
Now, I’m not saying that everyone needs to pick up their roots and become a location independant worker or digital vagabond. That’s certainly not a requirement. That’s one end in this path to liberation, and it just happens to be my goal.
Your goals may be complete different, but the philosophy applies to everything. When we make the changes in our lives, when we summon the courage to break free of the chains of the material world, we can do anything.
Happy new year everyone.
I’d love to hear what your plans are for the new decade. Let us know in the comments, drop me an email, or find me on Twitter.
Thank you so much for being a part of this revolution.