Hack Away at the Unessential
Midlife can get heavy in more ways than one. It could be as in your face as actual weight. It’s not called “single, unattached, twenty-something bod” for obvious reasons. You may have more actual humans living with you. These little humans physically take up space and come with lots of stuff that takes up even more space…you know all about the stuff because you trip over it in the middle of the night trying to find the Children’s Motrin.
The liabilities are piling up too. Maybe you have two incomes coming in and you’ve both done well financially, but isn’t it funny how your expenses always seem to creep up to your income level? It could be college planning, private schools, a club membership, or simply expense creep. The financial liabilities add to the weight.
And to be honest, we haven’t even started talking about the really heavy stuff yet. These all don’t apply to everyone, but they are out there:
What is the relationship with your spouse? And I mean really how is it?
Your career might be at an inflection point. You have potentially achieved success beyond what you thought possible, but yet, why does it feel like something is missing?
Or maybe you are stuck in your career because of those ever increasing liabilities.
Or maybe you are finding yourself avoiding or numbing some of these hard questions with [insert vice here]?
Unfortunately we are not done quite yet adding to the scale. To state the complete obvious, it is called midlife because you are somewhere around halfway and that can be an unsettling thought especially because we all know that the second half is going to feel quite a bit shorter than the first half (thank you very much proportional theory of time).
Because of this we start to become more acutely aware that we are finite human beings and that one day our time will come to say goodbye to this blue-green marble traveling through space at 67,000 miles per hour. You are more aware of your finitude because you have seen some heavy stuff. Terrible things have happened to those that you love. You have lost and dealt with tragedy at the frequency that (most likey) did not occur twenty years ago.
So what at all does this have to do with Bruce Lee? Well, a natural reaction when things get heavy is to get stronger. You’ve been able to power through it for most of your life so this is no different. You say to yourself that you can handle all this if…
If I increase my income by 50%
If I can bring in that next deal
If I can find an extra hour early in the morning and before bed
If I get my morning routine so dialed that my energy will carry through the day
But you already know what happens to your expenses when your income goes up 50%. You already know what happens when, as my favorite example, you get really productive at answering emails*.
My goal here is not to be a downer. It is to acknowledge the reason why the first word that comes to mind after the word “midlife” is “crisis.” You are not alone in facing whatever challenges you are facing - it is simply a natural cycle of where you are at.
Where I am convinced the magic of midlife happens is in curation mode rather than in addition mode. When you begin to actively focus on doing less of what isn’t serving you, something incredible happens. Things start to lighten up. There is a decent chance that this feeling will be foreign because the weight has been building for so long that you know nothing else. And in this newly created space, you will be freer to start making progress towards what truly matters to you in this second act.
Need some ideas on where to start? Start with a list. Make a list of fifty things that you currently have that you want less of. This could be everything from email to meetings to stress to social obligations. It doesn’t matter if the item is something that could get cut tomorrow or something that could never get cut. Write it down without attachment.
After you have finished, review the list and see what stands out. Are there themes? Are there places that you can start making changes tomorrow? Then pick at least one item and start taking action towards cutting it back.
*Answer: You get more emails
